Like Dubai itself, the Burj is crying out for an enterprising Indian documentary filmmaker with a hidden camera.
Another explicitly political film is The Last Adieu, by the respected actor and director Shabnam Sukhdev, about her father, Sukhdev Singh Sandhu (popularly known as Sukhdev), one of the pioneers of Indian documentary film-making.
The rules are in response to a lawsuit by Rakesh Sharma, an Indian documentary filmmaker who was detained by police in 2005 after using a hand-held video camera in Midtown.
Recently, an Indian TV documentary on female feticide, produced and presented by a well-known Bollywood actor, has opened up a debate on the subject.
(Yaar, apparently, is the Hindi word for dude.) Meanwhile, Mohan has fallen in love with Janvi (Serena Varghese), a happening Indian-American woman who is making a documentary on the Indian experience.
This year's edition of the New Directors/New Films continues with several choice selections, including "John & Jane Toll-Free," a documentary about Indian call-center workers, which was shown at last fall's Toronto Film Festival, and "Old Joy," a delicate story about time and friendship, and one of the most critically lauded fiction features to play at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Perhaps the most invaluable of these is "Inside Bjork" (both sets on One Little Indian), a one-hour documentary that includes video of the singer performing with her mid-1980's band K.U.K.L., as well as testimonials from fans (including Missy Elliott, Elton John and Sean Penn) and disarming observations from Bjork herself.
The Indian government banned the documentary, but I managed to find it online.
Instead of spending resources in suppressing the misogynist views expressed in the documentary, the Indian government should work on changing them by investing in quality education and taking better measures to protect women who are increasingly claiming their equality with men.
In addition to the stations, programs and documentaries by Indian producers are reaching a broader audience, largely through American Indian Radio on Satellite, the primary distribution system for Indian radio.
Relatively few organisations, however, can claim to have also facilitated documentaries on Indian puppeteers (Tomorrow We Disappear) and Finnish cowboys (Aatsinki), Michael Snow-likexperimentata (Jeff Frost's Circle of Abstract Ritual) and a stopmotion co-directed by an 11-year-old (Trinity and Barry Andersson's Me & Ewe).
