A product of collective filmmaking, ‘songs from our room’ emerges from shared meals, late-night conversations and the intimacies of friendship. At its center is Vanshika, a queer individual who reflects on living in a city that neither glorifies nor erases their identity, but instead carves out quiet spaces of belonging. Shaped in chapters—‘fight or flight,’ ‘(can we be friends?)’ and ‘comfort crowd’—the film traces the journey of a friendship, marked by queerness and becoming. Rooted in Mumbai yet reaching beyond, the film speaks of chosen families, everyday coexistence and the fragile, yet radical politics of dreaming.
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Anjani Chadha (she/her) is a writer and filmmaker whose work explores gender, memory, and the city through the lens of everyday life. Interested in the politics of the mundane, she works across fiction and nonfiction to examine how personal lives intersect with larger social and cultural structures. Her debut short film, City of Mirage, premiered at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in 2023 and has since screened at the KASHISH Pride Film Festival, the Bangalore Queer Film Festival, and other festivals. Alongside her independent practice, she has worked on commissioned fiction, nonfiction, and commercial films. She has also written on art, culture, and cinema for The New Indian Express, Indulge Express, and The Rolling Tape.
Niv (they/them) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Mumbai. Their work spans documentary, digital media, and research, and is grounded in feminist and social justice frameworks. They have worked across journalism and grassroots media where they have engaged in storytelling, social media production, and multimedia content creation. Their film ‘City of Mirage’ (2023) emerged from conversations around migration, queerness, and everyday life, and was shortlisted for Dimensions Mumbai at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. They also directed ‘On the Right Track’ (2024), a short film exploring the rhythms of Mumbai’s railway system alongside broader socio-political shifts, and was involved in all aspects of its production.
Vanshika Gupta is a researcher and multimedia storyteller working at the intersection of gender, space and informality. Their work is a pursuit of reimagining development practice as a living, breathing practice, one that listens, evolves and includes. Moving between journalism, visual media and academic research, they are interested in questions of belonging, memory and everyday life across social and digital spaces.