Ashim Ahluwalia
Miss Lovely
Delving deep into the underbelly of India’s film industry, where back-alley producers churn out everything from pulpy horror movies to soft-core porn, Miss Lovely is a wild ride that takes us back to the Mumbai of the 1980s with lurid detail and intoxicating style.Working out of sleazy hotels and abandoned warehouses, brothers Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and Vicky (Anil George) are prolific producers of trashy, C-grade films for Mumbai’s booming underground market. The ambitious, domineering Vicky is the unquestioned brains of the operation, leading the dim-witted Sonu deeper into a world of alcoholic divas, sleazy money men and movie-loving gangsters. But this precarious partnership is put to the test when the brothers meet Pinky (Niharika Singh), an exquisite ingénue with a shady past.With its near cubist attitude, baroque self-‐ reflexivity and total disregard for genre conventions, Miss Lovely operates like a joyfully mutilated Bollywood parable, punctured by influences of the Japanese New Wave.
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John & Jane
As fluorescent lights flicker overhead, the voices of ambitious young Indians fill the room with helpful advice and sanity-saving tips for the people of such faraway places as Kentucky and California -- just another day on the job for outsourced technical support workers making a living and increasingly westernized the world. In this documentary film from director Ashim Ahluwalia, cameras trace the moves of the patient souls working the midnight grind in order to follow American business hours as they study the Western values of work, money, and God. They dream of America before retreating to traditional Indian homes as the sun rises. Despite emerging American identities that help them to better perform their helpful duties, these workers remain distinctly Indian as they toil the nights while fantasizing about the American dream.
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