New York-based Oscar-winning director Megan Mylan’s documentary After My Garden Grows was screened in the city on Thursday and was co-hosted by Mahindra & Mahindra. The ten-minute documentary is about girl child marriages in India that tells the story of Monika, a rural Indian teenager growing food to feed her family, and the seeds of her own independence, in a tiny rooftop garden.
The movie also got support from Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, who hosted its special screening in Mumbai. Mylan, who has been making non-fiction films for almost two decades, thinks documentaries getting support from Bollywood stars is a good way to make it popular in the country.
“It’s incredibly powerful. Documentaries start out with the challenge of audiences remembering them as dreadfully boring films they watched in high school. But if people who have a big audience can tell their fans to give it a try, it will help,” she said.
Mylan has often taken inspiration from India for her documentaries like this one and Smile Pinki , but she is not tired of making films on the country as she believes there are numerous stories to present to the audience.
The director of Lost Boys of Sudan first visited India around six years back to make the Oscar-winning documentary Smile Pinki , based on a five-year-old girl from Varanasi with a severe cleft lip.
“It was such a privileged way to get to know this country. When I reached Varanasi, people were calling it a small town, but for Americans if a town has a million people, it’s not small,” said Mylan.
“I got to see the ancient place, the sacredness of it. I also met wonderful educated doctors. I got to see an interesting side of India while making the film and then when we came back, I toured cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai and I got to see another side of India. There are a billion people and billion stories to tell here,” she added.
Mylan is impressed by the way Hindi movies are made. “Bollywood films are incredible productions. We don’t have anything like it in the US. It’s impressive,” she said.
IANS
