Winner—Best Feature-Length Documentary, IDFA 2018
Facing severe backlash and even threats against his life, veteran director Anand Patwardhan, recipient of the Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award in 2022, details the use of violence and invocation of Hindu fundamentalism to squash opposition in India.
Anand Patwardhan’s intimate yet epic film brings us eight stories of injustice in India, the world’s largest democracy, where the battle between faith and reason relentlessly rages.
“As Pauline Kael remarked about the recently deceased Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, Reason (Vivek) makes most other current documentaries 'look like something you hold up on the end of a toothpick.’ Only the third film by Indian maestro Anand Patwardhan in the current century, this teemingly detailed epic exhaustively examines the rise of right-wing Hindu extremism through the bloody prism of politically inspired killings over the past half-decade.” - Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter
"Kudos to Anand Patwardhan for not being silenced by the prevailing atmosphere of fear including an open threat recorded on film—to make a documentary that is of immense value in India but speaks also to us because we see the parallel rise of right-wing nationalism throughout the world." - Marc Glassman, POV
*This cut of the film has been edited down by Anand Patwardhan from the original 218-minute runtime
In Hindi, Marathi and English with English subtitles.
Featuring a pre-recorded intro from director Anand Patwardhan.
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Year of the Vote:
Hot Docs presents a series of compelling documentaries marking the ‘Year of the Vote,’ as nearly half of the world’s population is eligible to go to the polls in 2024.
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