Independent Lens: India’s Daughter

Assassin Films, BBC Storyville, UK-INDIA, and Tathagat Films in association with Gamini Plyatissa Foundation, DR, Plus Pictures

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.

PRIMARY PRODUCTION CREDITS

Executive Producers: Nick Fraser, Kate Townsend, Mette Hoffman Meyer, Mette Heide, Sally Jo Fifer, Lois Vossen, Jana Shea, Greg Nobile, Lorna Auerbach, Thomas Morgan, Susan Sarandon, Leslie Decker, Stephen T Rimmer, Kathleen Glynn. Producer: Leslee Udwin. Director: Leslee Udwin.