INDIA'S DAUGHTER

Welcome to Center Stage, my name is Mark Gordon. India's daughter Chronicles, a brutal gang rape, and murder that shocked a nation.

Stay tuned as we go center stage with Leslie Adwen, director of India's daughter.

This has got to be one of the most powerful documentaries I've seen in a long time.

It really touched me to the core. I was just floored by what happened to this bright young woman.

Tell me how you found this story and how you went about chronicling it.

Mark, I think in a very similar way to what you just described, I felt that way when the news of this particularly horrific gang rape exploded across the television screens.

Suddenly of Europe and I believe of the world, but it wasn't at that point that I decided that I had to make a film about this subject.

It was the response to the rape that moved me to an unimaginable degree.

I just was so inspired and all struck and full of admiration and gratitude actually to witness these goals hundreds of thousands of people from wronging the streets with a passion that was beautiful.

It seemed to me that change was being heralded by that mass mobilization of civil society, demanding a change, crying enough as enough women have been violated and disrespected for long enough.

We want to see a safe free and equal world for women, quite apart from crying for justice for this particular girl in this case.

And I took it personally, Mark. I thought here are these people day after day. That was the other thing that they were so tenacious.

They went on for over a month.

Now after a week of witnessing these uplifting extraordinary sites, I saw the government cracked down on them so fiercely and that hurt me really badly.

Because these protesters had been beautiful, had been peaceful.

The protests were run on Gandian lines and a threatened government threatened, I suppose, by a society demanding that they do something about these violations of the human rights of women and girls.

They were threatened by a fear of civil war, probably, because these numbers of people on the streets were unprecedented. They hadn't seen sites like that since independence in 1947.

And they cracked down on them as you saw in the film with water hoses and tear gas shells and police beating up innocent and beautiful protesters.

And that is the point at which I decided, that's it. I have to do something. I can't just sit here in my chair being horrified by the rape and admiring them.

I have to actually get out there and join those protests. And when I said join the protests, I mean in the way that I can in my met here as a filmmaker. I knew them that I had to amplify their voices in the shape of a film, a documentary.

There's an interview with her mother in the film and she says, when her daughter was in the hospital, we were by her side, but we were helpless to do anything.

And then I think about what you did to go out there and to try to give a voice to what had happened to try to give a voice to this young woman and women all over the world that are being sexually assaulted.

My aim I suppose was try filled in setting out. The first thing I knew I had to do was, as I've just said, amplify the voices I was so grateful to, because they were fighting for my rights.

And I should point out also on that point that I have never to date, seem any other country do that. India is so admirable in this. They direct the world by example. And that was the one absolute imperative for me. The other was to document and pay tribute to and find out what life has been lost here, because in India you're not allowed to name a rape victim.

So, he was just known as that 23 year old medical student who went to the movies and got gang raped and killed and that was it. A life is enough doubt. I wanted to know and pay tribute to who we had lost. And my god when I found out who she was, it makes it, you know, I mean any loss of life is heartbreaking, but when you know that this girl stood up to the restrictive.

That's a restrictive, patriarchal society, the tried to crush her, hopes and dreams, her aspirations. She wanted to be a medical doctor since the earliest age, this society deemed her as a girl, not to be, you know, requiring education.

And she had to really fight for it. She fought at every turn. She fought to overturn these prejudices. When she saw a man staring at her on a street, she would stop in her tracks and look him in the eyes and say, what are you staring at? I'm not your property.

And, you know, she was an extraordinary young woman with dreams of building a hospital in a parents ancestral village and helping the poor and particularly women. And that was the life stuff. So that was, you know, the second part of my objective and endeavor here was to document that loss and the third and absolute imperative for me.

Was to find a meaningful answer to the question, why, why does this violence happen with such alarming regularity across our world?

Not just in India as we know, but globally. And the only way to get that answer in a meaningful way was to interview the rapists, was to go to the source of the action and find out what is in the head of men who do this.

That must have been very, very hard to talk with these men and to hear the responses.

Because the things that they say, I was just, I could not believe it. The victim is the one that needs to explain why this happened. And just the way that they justify the treatment of women.

Well, here's the really strange thing, Mark. The whole journey is characterized by a complete reversal of expectation on pretty much every level.

Everything I thought would be one way was another. I was so sure that I would be a distraught and be hanged. I thought I'd be furious as I sat opposite these men. And so much so that I actually decided to practice on other rapists.

Because this is my first documentary. I've never interviewed people before, and the really significant factor is this. When I was 18, I'm one of those women, one in five, who's raped? I was raped at 18.

And I'm ashamed to have to say I didn't report this rape. If I had remembered the man's name in later years, I would have done that I don't even remember his name. And for 20 years, I kept this silent. I didn't even tell my best friend.

And I worried that as I sat there opposite them, all of this might well up inside me. I might physically assault one of them. I thought I'd feel so disgusted, et cetera. So I decided to practice on other rapists.

One of these other rapists had raped a five year old girl. And I have a daughter who was 13 when I left her to go and make this film in India.

It was incredibly difficult, but I didn't feel what I assumed I would feel. I didn't feel any anger, not for one second, and 31 hours of interviewing seven rapists. And the reason I didn't feel anger is because it was so utterly obvious to me that these men had been robotically programmed,

taught how to think of women a certain way. And when I learned about their backgrounds, when I learned about how they will have seen their mothers beaten up by their fathers, the guy who raped the five year old girl, his father used to punish him by leaving him out on a balcony without food for several days. Now, I'm not saying that I had pity for the rapists personal circumstances.

Now, I'm saying, if I had pity for the world that teaches these men, that violence is okay, that teaches these men that women have to behave in a restricted and particular way.

If they don't, then they're fair game, because that's what the rapists in this case thought or tells us that six of them thought about beauty. When she got on that bus with a boy who was a male friend and she was out at night.

She had to be told to listen. That's because I stood the word he uses. So they are programmed and we're not dealing with rough maples in the barrel. The barrel is rotten.

The heinousness of this crime. I mean, they pulled out her intestines. I, I, you just think, my God, what was going on in their minds to do that to this, this person,

to objectivire so much to not even see a real person. And furthermore, is that why they don't mention the name of the person that's been raped?

Because if they started to do that, you would put a face on the crime. You would say that could have been my daughter.

Well, I think, you know, bending is a backwards to understand their point of view. I think there is cogent argument in saying that, in a culture, where shame and dishonor adheres to the victim of rape, which is absolutely outrageous and he and is so unfair.

But it is true of that culture. So in a culture like that, you want to protect the identity of the rape victim.

Now, that is a sort of ridiculous vicious circle. I'm sure you agree, but seeing it from their point of view, that is why they would say, we protect the identity of the rape victim by not allowing her to be named.

Equally, yes, it does have that effect, you know, of numbing. She's a cipher. It's why I wanted to document who she was, because, you know, otherwise she's just a cipher, just another figure on the mountain of raped violated bodies, you know.

You mentioned that you rehearsed the interviews because you thought you were going to respond in a certain way and you didn't, and that was something that you learned.

What else did you learn in the process, either about this person that you're reporting on or the rapist or just yourself as an artist?

Well, a great deal, and almost in every case, it was accompanied by this, you know, reverse of expectation, as I say, with every reverse of human insight.

I also expected these men to feel something of some glimmer of remorse, you know, in 31 hours.

And when one of them, the one who had raped the five year old had been incarcerated at that point for five years, you'd think that in that amount of time, he would have processed it.

He would have come to some realization of guilt and how wrong this was and feel some remorse, not a daughter of it.

None of them expressed one second of remorse in 31 hours.

And the reason for that is, again, they don't believe fundamentally that they've done anything wrong.

And when I asked the rapist of the five year old at the end of the interview, help me please, I beg you, help me to understand how you cross that line.

From wanting to do this to a little creature standing there in this five year old in this this high, and you've described everything about her terror and her, you know, I can picture her now.

So now I don't understand how you can actually want to do this and then cross that line and do it.

And he looked at me like I was often other planet for even asking him the question and he said exactly this I have it on film he said.

She was a beggar girl, her life was of no value.

And that is what it comes down to, that is a huge insight for me. It's all about value, you know, when in Rwanda the Huitu regime wanted a genocide committed on another tribe, the virtuancies.

What did they do? They started a propaganda campaign as the Nazis did before the Holocaust.

This is humanity, you know, since time immemorial, you devalue a life in order to make it easier for it to be snuffed out.

So the Huitu regime starts this, actually it was a radio campaign in Rwanda.

And they start this campaign in which they're calling the Nazis cockroaches.

So if someone's a cockroach, you can take your foot and snap them out. And, you know, ISIS is beheading people, why?

Because they're infidels, they're of a different religion, so they're of no value. It all comes down to value.

And the fight we're fighting is women and girls and these violations of our rights across the world and this horrendous abuse of women and girls.

I mean, what are we talking about when women who are or should be half the world's population?

Women who bring us all into the world are devalued.

If I can sit through and find us overlining with this is her sacrifice, her ultimate sacrifice.

The legacy that is going to be created from what happened to her is really so powerful.

And it's just sad that she had to go through this, but what a monumental thing this is going to do to hopefully empower a change.

Indeed, and Mark, I pledge myself, I commit myself to that change because, you know, this is my first documentary in my first directing experience.

It's also my last until an education initiative that I have now committed my life to, because I've become an activist now.

My cannot have these searing blindingly clear insights and step aside from now and just go off and make another film about another subject.

If you know and do nothing, then you're as guilty as the perpetrator.

Correct. Absolutely. All of us, if we are silent, we collude. That's for sure.

The film was actually banned in India, correct?

It was, and it was banned without the regime actually even seeing it isn't that shocking.

Has it been shown yet or no?

No. It's still banned. There has been four Germans of the court case, a petition brought by two, a journalist and a social activist who has petitioned a court to lift this undemocratic, unconstitutional.

I would add idiotic, blind and misguided ban, a ban that brings shame on India.

They've accused me of bringing shame on India. That's why they've banned the film.

Ever sensitive to their image and their economic program internationally and accused me of decimating their tourist industry, etc.

Well, what brings shame upon them is the ban, of course, not the film, because everyone else in the rest of the world looks at this film.

And it's perfectly willing to introspect and say yes, we're guilty too. This isn't just an India problem.

It's global. It happens in our country too, one in four girls on college campuses is raped in the US, in the UK, one in three girls, between the age of 13 and 17, experience sexual violence.

The figure for general mutilation in Egypt is 96% isn't that horrendous.

And we must not forget, and don't worry, I'm not going to be very graphic with this, but really we must not forget when we say FGM and have all these, you know, meet little acronyms, the things which come tripping the off the tongue, FGM.

Let's not forget what that actually is, what men are doing to women.

We really have to band together now and say we're not having this anymore. We've looked at slavery, we've looked at race, we've even looked and I'm thrilled to say we have at the LGBT community and they are much further on than women are.

India's daughter is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. For more information about the film, visit India's.org.com.

Until next time, this is Mark Gordon and I'll see you, center stage.