Hot Roads

In Bangladesh, the land with the highest density of population in the world (and the highest amount of corruption), the daily struggle to survive is fought everywhere, including the streets. Nowhere do people drive as brutally and recklessly as here. In Bangladesh you drive on the road like others drive with a bumper car: if you need space, you simply ram the car driving next to you. The police only came if there are fatalities. The biggest bottleneck in the transport system is the historical old town of Dhaka. Old Dhaka is a universe of its own, a world of bazaars in which every trade has its own quarter: there are streets of jewelers, sweets makers and fashionable tailors, and the vegetable wholesalers have their warehouses down at the port. The deliveries take place mostly on the river, the Buriganga River, a stinking cesspool. But the sold goods usually leave by land, and the customers also come by the land route – the Nawabpur Road. They generally come in buses or by rickshaw, where too many people are crammed into too little space. The traffic in Dhaka is everyday, normal madness. The film accompanies a rickshaw, a bus and a truck on their dangerous way through the streets of Dhaka and shows how it is possible to survive in what seems to be an incontrollable chaos. (S1 E02)