Appunti per un film sull'India (1968)

Directed by

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre

documentary film

Country

Italy

Runtime

34 min

Rating

6.2 of 10 from 7 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini travels through India to scout locations for a planned film about a king who feeds himself to a starving tiger. He interviews ordinary people and a few public figures about poverty, population, and modernization, while also filming a Sikh soldier he imagines as the king.

observationalcontemplativeinquisitivegroundedearnestunhurriedthoughtful

What happens

Appunti per un film sull'India (English: Notes for a Film on India) is a 1968 short documentary film by Pier Paolo Pasolini where he visits India to do a recce for his proposed film with India as its background about a king who gives up his body to feed a starving tiger. The film was shot around post-independent India when it was facing grave challenges of poverty, population and caste system. Pasolini narrates the challenges of India and its charms amidst all the problems the country faces. The 33-minute-long documentary is composed of short interviews from random people about their opinions on matters such as family planning. The documentary also shows short interviews of journalists and one politician about the challenges India faces in modernizing itself without becoming westernized or losing the Indian identity in the process. The film opens and ends with a shot of a Sikh soldier, who, Pasolini identifies, in his commentary, as the one who would play the role of Maharaja in his film. Among others Pasolini interviewed for his film the former Maharaja of Bhavanagar and his wife and well-known Urdu story writer and filmmaker Rajinder Singh Bedi. The documentary was shot in many places including New Delhi, Jaipur, Rishikesh and Varanasi etc. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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