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"India's Daughter" is utterly shocking, completely appalling and often difficult to watch — although you can hardly take your eyes off it.
It's the story of the 2012 gang rape and murder of a young Indian woman and the protests the crime set off within the country — and the social movement it fostered around the world.
Filmmaker Leslee Udwin, whose hourlong film airs on PBS' "Independent Lens" on Tuesday, interviewed the men convicted of the crime (and sentenced to death by hanging), and what they say is chilling.
"You can't clap with one hand. It takes two hands to clap," says 28-year-old Mukesh Singh. "A decent girl wouldn't roam around at 9 o'clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy."
The victim, 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh (no relation), attended a movie and got on a private bus (common in India) with a male friend afterward for a ride home. The young man was beaten; Jyoti was beaten and raped by six men — including a 17-year-old. And if that wasn't horrific enough, they ripped out her intestines.
More horrific still, perhaps, is how Mukesh Singh (who claims he only drove the bus) calmly excuses and justifies what happened.
"Boy and girl are not equal," he says. "Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night. Doing wrong things. Wearing wrong clothes.
"About 20 percent of girls are good."
And he refers to the crime as an "accident."
Udwin — who was herself raped when she was 18 — admitted she was shocked. Her trip to India to film the interviews "was a journey into the heart of darkness" that was "characterized by a reversal of expectations."
"I expected to be meeting with psychopaths, monsters. Not one of them was," she said. "I assumed there would be reticence on all of these rapists' part to talk about the rapes they had committed or were involved in. I also assumed they'd be remorseful. … In the 31 hours [of interviews], there was not one second of remorse. There was also no reticence whatsoever.
"Why is that? It's clearly because, deep down, they do not believe they have done anything wrong."
Equally troubling are her interviews with the lawyers who defended the rapists. Udwin said she expected that the rapists, "because of their lack of education, were more prone to commit these sort of acts or more prone to thinking of women as second-class citizens."
"But then I spent these nine hours with 100 percent of their defense team … and what they said betrayed a much deeper, rooted misogyny. And their statements were far, far more shocking."
The problem, she believes, is societal. Not restricted to India, but men have been "programmed" to see women as lesser beings.
"If we teach them from the first breath they draw in this world that a girl is of lesser or no value, how on earth do we expect them to behave?" Udwin said. "We are responsible. Our education system is responsible. Society is responsible for these men's actions. That's the resounding conclusion I've reached."
And, while the Indian government banned "India's Daughter" in that country, Udwin is quick to point out that it's about the larger issue of rape and abuse that isn't specific to India.
"I actually went out there to praise India for leading the world by example in those protests," she said. "Rape in India is not the issue. This film has global statistics at the end of it. That's the last punch line of the film — that no viewer can be left off the hook at the end of this documentary, thinking these things happen to those people over there. They happen right here."
Twitter: @ScottDPierce —
On TV
P "Independent Lens" airs the American premiere of "India's Daughter" on Tuesday at 11 p.m. on KUED-Ch. 7.