When India entered one of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, millions of migrant workers found themselves stranded in the cities they had helped build, suddenly without wages, shelter or meaningful protection. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s emergency measures, an estimated 200 million workers were displaced, with around 10 million attempting the long journey back to their villages — many on foot, across hundreds of miles, in dangerous and uncertain conditions.
In The Great Abandonment, Indian filmmakers Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya follow migrant labourers in Mumbai as they confront impossible choices: remain in the city and wait for work that may not return, undertake a hazardous journey home, or stay and organise for dignity amid shrinking labour protections and restrictions on protest. Moving between these different paths, the film builds a stark portrait of a workforce treated as disposable despite being essential to India’s urban economy.
Both intimate and political, The Great Abandonment exposes the brutal imbalance between the labour that sustains modern cities and the protections denied to those who perform it. While rooted in the specific realities of India’s lockdown, the film speaks to a global condition: the invisibility, vulnerability and exploitation of migrant workers whose lives become most visible only when the systems depending on them begin to collapse.
Directors: Shirley Abraham, Amit Madheshiya
Website: Guardian Documentaries
