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Documentary
Louis Malle called his gorgeous and groundbreaking Phantom India the most personal film of his career. And this extraordinary journey to India, originally shown as a miniseries on European television, is infused with his sense of discovery, as well as occasional outrage,…
How can you capture in the lens of a film camera the essence of a country so diverse, so variegated, and so paradoxical as India?
Southern India pretends to know nothing about the North. Its language is different, its very nature too. In Madras Louis Malle discovers a striking example of that world of opposites to be found in traditional India: thousands cramming the streets at a strange ceremony centuries old, and a family planning clinic; a film studio making folk-lore musicals, and the famous Kalachetra dance school where dancing is itself a language, a prayer, an invocation to God.
Louis Malle finds a devotion to a spiritual life that transcends the poverty of the material one and discovers that in a country as crowded as India, religion is the one way for the individual to be alone.
Drifting at random through the numberless villages of the South, Louis Malle finds himself in a timeless, fantastic, and to a western eye, almost surrealist world. Kerala is like a dream, with its exotic lagoons, game reserves and palm-fringed beaches - a species of tropical Paradise Lost. At the same time it's a battleground for the conflicting forces of Capitalism and Maoism, a land where even the Communists are split into three separate parties, and democracy and collectivism wrestle with the traditions of a country that by nature rejects them both.
Although officially abolished, the caste system has not ceased to exert a strong influence on Indian social life. It is not a problem of colour, race nor even of class. It is far subtler and harder to pin down, as Louis Malle discovers as soon as he starts to ask those awkward questions about caste that Indians are reluctant to answer. For the Hindu, division into castes is like a law of nature, a logical expression of his vision of the Universe. Castes are religious boundaries that run through heads and through hearts but not along the ground; they are those invisible frontiers of the mind that to India are so natural and to the West so incomprehensible.
Turning aside from the traditional India of the Hindus, Louis Malle pans his camera on to the India of forgotten tribes and tiny sects. He discovers two versions of Utopia: one, the Ashram at Pondicherry whose disciples claim through yoga to have discovered the secret of the ultimate meaning of life; the other, the natural gentle life of the Todas, a people who live in total sexual freedom, without laws, leaders or class system, at peace with themselves and with their neighbours, and whose only problem is that they are doomed by the advance of civilisation.
Bombay. It's the last lap of Louis Malle 's journey through India and already it smacks of the West. Bombay is a city on the move, in the middle of an economic boom. Parsee industrialists, Muslim craftsmen, and immigrant labourers from the South all meet here in this cosmopolitan city, whose slums are as poverty-stricken as those of Calcutta, but whose modern factories, oil refineries, and traffic problems all show the shadow of the West. It's where Hinduism meets Industrialisation, where East goes West, where the India of yesterday and today meets the India of tomorrow. But what kind of tomorrow?
Self - Narrator
India with Sanjeev Bhaskar is a four-part documentary from the BBC in which Sanjeev Bhaskar travels to India with director Deep Sehgal. The documentary was created as part of the BBC's series of programmes on the 60th anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan. The series was broadcast between 30 July and 20 August 2007.
Communism spread to all of the continents of the word, lasting through four generations and over seven decades. Hundreds of millions of men and women were affected by this political system, one of the most unjust and bloodiest in history. Using newly discovered propaganda films and archival photos, these four episodes explore the mysteries of this totalitarian political machine that lured its share of important followers into the fold. Known as the red church, communism seduced its ardent followers like some earthly religion.
It started with Lenin and ended with Gorbachev. In this three-part documentary we highlight the people and events that played key roles in the rise of a revolutionary idea and the fall of an empire. How was it possible that this idea could fascinate so many people, including hundreds of intellectuals? How did so many thousands of people put up with suppression, indignity and economic hardship and still remain true to the fundamental concepts of communism?
The story of an empire: From its founding in 1922 to its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union was shaped by revolutionary idealism, but also by oppression and decay. The USSR evolved from Stalinist terror through the Thaw under Khrushchev to political processes such as glasnost and perestroika under Gorbachev. Finally, in 1991, it collapsed.
