Dharamtalla is Calcutta's cosmopolitan downtown, but the Dharamtalla Fair, held every Sunday on the city's common, is its true cultural crossroads. This is a fair by and for the city's immigrant workers from the villages; here, rural folkways flourish-and have for generations-in virtual defiance of city life, and those who live on the extreme margins of society thrive, against all odds, amidst the metropolitan mainstream. This documentary, made by the Shape Film Collective, one of India's most honored documentary groups, is both a portrait and an appreciation of the people of the Dharamtalla Fair; its strength, as Indian critics have noted, lies in capturing the essential humanity of these medicine sellers, animal trainers, acrobats, singers, fortune tellers, whole families participating together in acts, some of them achieved with such primitive means as to appear perilous indeed. For these performers, Sundays are a balancing act in more ways than one, for they depend on the fair at Dharamtalla for the social interactions which keep their way of life not marginal, but integral.