India's Daughter focus of China film festival

A screen shot from India's Daughter. [File photo]

'Global campaign'

On the night of Dec 16, 2012, the five adult men with irregular livelihoods and the juvenile were driving a privately run bus through New Delhi when they chanced upon the victim and her male companion who were returning home after an evening out watching a film.

The woman and her friend boarded the near-empty bus and soon found themselves in an altercation with the gang. This followed the gang beating them with metal bars. The woman was then repeatedly raped before being thrown off the moving bus onto a street along with her friend, the media said.

Following intensive care at a hospital in the city for more than a week after the assault, the woman-with three abdominal surgeries and a cardiac arrest by then - was airlifted to Singapore by the Indian government and admitted to a hospital for specialist treatment. She died there owing to massive damages to her body.

The alleged ringleader of the convicted gang was found hanged from a grill in the ceiling of his prison cell in New Delhi, in an apparent suicide the following spring, the media said.

New Delhi sees the highest number of sex attacks among India's major cities, according to official statistics. A rape is reported every 20 minutes or so.

The brutality of this crime forced a spasm of public protests across India against the treatment of women. The Indian government tightened laws and opened fast-track courts to try such cases. But for the victim's family, their daughter, who fought her attackers hard, was gone.

The dignity of the victim's parents in engaging with the world even after such trauma comes through in Udwin's documentary. They knew their daughter wouldn't make it back from Singapore. The doctors in New Delhi had told the min the early days after the vicious attack that it was only a matter of time.

"It is my tribute to her," says Udwin.

Her film was always "going to be a global campaign", Udwin says. Her objectives for the project were to show how violently a life had been cut short, "what goes on inside the heads of these men (who perpetrate such crimes)" and capturing the public outrage the incident sparked.

Udwin also says that she found her interviewees (men convicted in other rape cases as well) to be ordinary people, not the "monsters" their actions have made them.

In past comments to the media, prominent Indian feminist Kavita Krishnan likened Udwin's documentary to a "rap on the knuckles (of India) from the 'civilized world'".