Independent Lens: India’s Daughter

Essential viewing, though painful at times to watch, India’s Daughter chronicles the internationally infamous gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old medical student, in Delhi in 2012, and the protest movement it inspired. Leslee Udwin’s documentary confronts head-on the hideous misogyny ingrained, almost enshrined, in India’s culture. To see Jyoti’s parents, bereft and angry, speaking tearfully about their beloved daughter, her dreams and her violent death, is heart-breaking. To see her rapist-killers not only excuse their crime by invoking ancient notions of women’s subservient place in society but also to justify the attack – “a girl is far more responsible for a rape than a boy” – is grotesque. Like the women and men of India who have taken up Jyoti’s cause, who have embraced her as their own child, Independent Lens: India’s Daughter bears brave witness to this societal sickness and to change that’s overdue, and for this it wins a Peabody Award.