Read what critics and journalists have to say about the POV film that aired on Monday, September 16 and will be streaming for free online until October 16, 2013!
The World Before Her is a tale of two Indias. In one, Ruhi Singh is a small-town girl competing in Bombay to win the Miss India pageant—a ticket to stardom in a country wild about beauty contests. In the other India, Prachi Trivedi is the young, militant leader of a fundamentalist Hindu camp for girls, where she preaches violent resistance to Western culture, Christianity and Islam. Moving between these divergent realities, the film creates a lively, provocative portrait of the world’s largest democracy at a critical transitional moment—and of two women who hope to shape its future. Winner, World Documentary Competition Award, 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. A co-presentation with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM).
“A fascinating study of the forces at work in a vast, complex country struggling to straddle modern and ancient values in the 21st century.”
— The Christian Science Monitor
“Riveting.”
— Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“The World Before Her offers a portrait of two women and two Indias—the urban and the rural, the capitalistic and fundamentalist, the modern and the traditional.”
— New York Daily News
“With extraordinary access, Pahuja illuminates extraordinary conflicts and contradictions facing modern girls.”
— Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice
“Extreme choices and attitudes confronting women in India are laid bare in Nisha Pahuja’s quietly shocking film.”
— Peter Howell, Toronto Star
“In Nisha Pahuja’s brilliant documentary The World Before Her, the controversial politics of pageantry transcend borders. . . . The documentary’s India is one struggling to define its own relationship with the present and the past, and by extension its vision for the future.”
— Matt Brennan, IndieWire
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