Shot primarily in Calcutta, The Glass System looks at life as it is played out in public. Every street corner turned reveals activities both simple and mesmerizing: a knife sharpener on a bicycle, a tiny tightrope walker, a hauntingly slow portrait of the darting eyes of schoolgirls on their way home, the uncompleted activities of a young contortionist. The Glass System expresses the film-maker’s sense of yearning for a lost New York, a place which exists in a dream where life in the streets was both complicated and fleeting.

Mark LaPore