MoviefiedNYC Interviews Ashim Ahluwalia

Miss Lovely, Future East Films

MoviefiedNYC, run by friends of Augury John David West and Myrna Duarte, sat down with Indian director and former documentary filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia (John & Jane, Thin Air), about his award-winning debut feature, Miss Lovely, recently released in NYC and set in the criminal depths of Mumbai’s C-grade film industry.

Ahluwalia talks about the business of Indian cinema and the emergence of the C-grade movie:

… [P]ornography is illegal—just to put it in context—any kind of pornographic material is illegal; it will get you a minimum of three years. It’s non-bailable. So when you think about these movies, they’re not B-movies, which want to be real movies; they’re C-grade movies that are made for the excuse for these sex bits to be illegally interspersed. They get interspersed at the cinema level, and not through the censors. So these reels, in the ‘80s, used to be delivered on bicycle at night and get spliced into these movies. So you’d have a movie, which people would be waiting for the sex bit to appear. I was fascinated by this.”

MoviefiedNYC provides in-depth film criticism, reviews, lists, and film suggestions that feature old, new, and upcoming films. The site also covers film-related events happening in New York City and around the world.

Read the full interview, “Making Movies that Matter,” here.

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