Grads release acclaimed documentary

Eight years and one documentary after graduating from Penn, 2006 College graduate Adam Weber discovered that required reading can, in fact, come in handy later in life.

Weber, along with his friend and 2007 College graduate Jimmy Goldblum , co-produced and co-directed a documentary called “Tomorrow We Disappear,” which premiered last weekend. The film was inspired by Salman Rushdie’s novel “Midnight’s Children,” written in 1981 about India’s transition from British Colonialism to independence to British partition.

Weber and Goldblum based the documentary on a scene in the novel where the protagonist encounters a magician’s ghetto — a slum inhabited by circus performers, magicians and puppeteers. Rushdie created the ghetto as an allegory for the real-life tinsel slum of the Kathputli colony on the western edge of New Delhi .

“It really got to me,” Goldblum said. “I realized that Rushdie had based the scene on a real place, and I thought it would make an incredible documentary.”

Tomorrow We Disappear presents its viewers with the compromise that the New Delhi government is making in bulldozing the Kathputli Colony, forcing its residents to relocate, and building a strip mall in its place.

“You can’t build something new without losing something old,” Goldblum said.

The documentary has been received with critical commendation. The feature was described as “one of the best documentaries of 2014” by Indiewire and was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival.

After graduation, Weber worked as an apprentice editor for Inglorious Basterds and Goldblum won an Emmy for a project at the Pulitzer Center in the “new approaches to documentary” category. Their path to Tomorrow We Disappear began when Goldblum and Weber took Paul Hendrickson’s class in documentary writing as English majors.

“A lot of the ideas that led to it [Tomorrow We Disappear] were born out of our education there,” Goldblum said.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.