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‘The World Is Family’ Review: A Wistful Chronicle of Personal Politics Beginning in India’s Freedom Movement
Documentarian Anand Patwardhan employs home video footage to explore his family's politics from India's Independence Movement to the present.
Patwardhan’s 1992 breakout “Ram ke Naam” (“In the Name of God”) was a prescient chronicle of India’s growing Hindu supremacist movement, while several of his other works, like “Jai Bhim Comrade” from 2011, shed light on the country’s caste hegemony. These perspectives and more inform his familial portrait too, which seeks to explore the intimate details of his parent’s youth under British rule, his uncles’ revolutionary activities alongside Mahatma Gandhi, and the ways in which the Gandhian dream of secular liberation has succeeded and failed in the years since India’s independence in 1947. He unfurls India’s social stratification through subtle forms of drama, and through seemingly fleeting interactions — for instance, with Hindu and Muslim children, to gauge their perspectives on the country’s trajectory — during his journey across locations important to his family history.
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