Asees Prab grew up in Chandigarh, left for Australia to pursue her PhD, and came back with a question — why does the rest of the world find this city fascinating while the people who actually live here barely know it?That question translated into two short films — Act! Citizen and Otherness.Making films was never the plan. “These films were not supposed to be films. They were just footages that turned into films as the whole process unfolded,” she said. “These are not cinematic objects but research artefacts. The idea is not to conclude Chandigarh. It’s to provoke and open a dialogue.”Act! Citizen follows a kabadiwala who had spent 25 years in Chandigarh without ever visiting the Capitol Complex. “He had absolutely no idea about his own city,” she said.Her second film, Otherness, takes on Le Corbusier’s modularity — the design principle behind everything from Chandigarh’s doorknobs to its entire sector grid — and asks who it leaves out. Street vendors still finding their corners. Women navigating spaces not built with them in mind. “The modularity is around a six-foot-tall European man. As a female, I feel maybe we are the sexualized others. What about designing for universal accessibility? Where do we have the ramps?” she said.She chose film over a conventional thesis because the research was always meant for Chandigarh’s people, not an academic journal in Australia. “I kept thinking, I’m doing my research there but for the people here. What am I going to do with that research if I can’t bring it back?” she said.The shorts were premiered at Tagore Theatre on Saturday.