A neighbourhood watched itself on a cinema screen.

The people funding it had never stood in it.

Yein Udaan works in Chetpet's Dhobighat. With children, with their parents, with the women of the community. Education, sports, healthcare, livelihoods, confidence.

Donors were reading about all of it on paper. None of them had heard a classroom there at four in the afternoon.

The work was bigger than anything you could hand someone.

Vedika Agarwal, the founder, came to us wanting a stronger deck.

The longer we listened, the clearer it became that there was nothing wrong with the deck. The work simply didn't fit inside one. A child's schooling, a mother's first income, a family's confidence — all one thing in life, and separate bullet points on a page.

Everything true about Yein Udaan is true across years, households and a whole neighbourhood. That is very hard to put on a slide.

Then we did something that wasn't in the brief.

We screened it twice.

The first was at AGS Cinemas. A real theatre, for donors, patrons, press, well-wishers — and for the parents and children who are in the film, watching their own lives on a cinema screen.

The second screening was in Chetpet itself. Public, in the community, for the people who live there.

Chetpet has spent a long time being written off by the rest of the city. For one evening, the neighbourhood sat down and watched what it had built.