IFFLA 08′: Interview Liz Mermin (Shot in Bombay)

A couple of weeks ago, Yama Rahimi attended the Indian Film Festival in
Los Angeles (from April 22nd to the 27th). Now in its 6th edition, the
festival works at promoting a greater appreciation of Indian
cinema by showcasing films about India and the diverse perspectives of
the Indian Diaspora. Here is his coverage.

Outrageously funny and insightful, Liz Mermin’s documentary explores the make-up of Bollywood filmmaking by sampling it on the set of “Shootout at Lokhandwala” with the real incident on which the film is based and the real life court drama of a Bollywood star undergoes.

Regardless of a viewer’s knowledge of the Bollywood (it’s tradition, style and form), the docu offers a behind the scenes of the film where the director outshines the big stars, where cops imitate Hollywood cop films like “Dirty Harry”, and how one of the longest running court cases in India’s history against Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt (who has been on trial since 1993 that included several arrests) manages t0 stay in the business with a total of 54 films under his belt.

Yama Rahimi: Liz, how did this project come to you?
Liz Mermin: Actually I was asked by a production company to make a film about Bollywood. So I said let’s look at one film so we went to Bombay to explore and found two films that were interested. I found out at the end about “Shootout at Lokhandwala” which became very interesting because it wasn’t about Bollywood  alone but its ties to the underworld. How things were in the 90s and now.

YR: You are doing eclectic work going from Afghanistan to India. How do you choose your projects?
LM: The projects find me. I’m always reading the newspapers and read about Americans going to Kabul to open a beauty institute which I thought was insane.  Who are these people and what are they doing. So that’s “Beauty Academy of Kabul” came about. Same was with “Office Tigers” that came from article in the New Yorker. I was talking to a friend about it and she said knows the people.

YR: What made you become a filmmaker?
LM: If you asked as a kid or even after college, I never thought to become a filmmaker. I was more an academic and spend a year in Senegal after college where I was told it was the birth place of African cinema so I wrote about it. So I watched all those films and met the filmmakers. Documentaries were at the rise back then in the early 90’s so when I got back I attended a program at NYU about documentary filmmaking.