It is common to criticise the huge Bollywood musical churning industry for its lack of grey matter. Most productions challenge only the dimwits and cater to the intelectually handicapped, and Indian media criticism hasn't covered the ground beyond arguing which film will be selected by the Indian government as the official entry for Oscars. Cerebral cinema exists on the sidelines of the national cine-consciousness and you won't catch it unless you you set out to perform such a task.

This week, the WSN profiles some remarkable work produced by one of the most remarkable people in the industry, Anand Patwardhan. He is a documentary filmmaker, with an English literature degree from Bombay University, credentials in Sociology from Brandeis University and an M.A. in Communication studies from McGill University. An anti- Vietnam war protagonist, a volunteer in Caesar Chavez’ United Farm Workers Union, some work in a rural development and education project in Central India and in several movements for civil liberties and democratic rights. Virtually all his films faced censorship by the Indian authorities but were finally cleared after legal action. His 'War and Peace' made in 2002 was in the news when the CBFC India (Central Board for Film Certification, more popularly known as the censor board), refused to certify the film without making cuts. As always, Patwardhan took the government to court and won the right to screen his film without a single cut. Since many of his films have won national awards, Patwardhan has successfully fought in court to force a reluctant national broadcaster, Doordarshan, to show these films on their national network.

War and Peace Jung Aur Aman

Filmed over three tumultuous years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the USA - War and Peace records peace activism in a time of global militarism and war. Triggered by macabre scenes of jubilation that greeted nuclear testing in the subcontinent, the film is framed by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. Fifty years later memories of Gandhi  seem like a mirage that never was, created by our thirst for peace and our very distance from it.

Ribbons for Peace

An anti-nuke music video made in the wake of India's nuclear tests revisits a 60'sHindi film song by Kishore Kumar, a precurser to John L e n n o n ' s "Imagine".

Fishing: In the Sea of Greed

Fishing communities in India and Bangladesh begin to resist "rape and run" industrialscale fishing that has begun to decimate their livelihood destroy their environment.

Occupation: Millworker

Textile mills were once the backbone of Bombay's economy and provided the city its working class culture. Today, foreign investment and rising real-estate prices have made selling mill lands more profitable than running mills. The film records the inspirational action of workers who, after a four-year lockout, forcibly occupied The New Great Eastern Mill.

A Narmada Diary co-produced and directed with Simantini Dhuru

The Sardar Sarover Dam in western India, lynch-pin of a mammoth development project on the river Narmada's banks, has been criticized as uneconomical and unjust. It will benefit urban India at a cost borne by the rural poor. When completed,  the dam will drown 37,000 hectares of fertile land, displace over 200,000 adivasis - the area's indigenous people -, and cost up to 400 billion rupees. Ecological, cultural, and human costs - as often is the case with "mega" projects - have never been estimated. The film introduces the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the Save Narmada Movement) which has spearheaded the agitation against the dam. As government resettlement programs prove inadequate, the Narmada Bachao Andolan has emerged as one of the most dynamic struggles in India today. With non-violent protests and a determination to drown rather than to leave their homes and land, the people of the Narmada valley have become symbols of a global struggle against unjust development.

Father, Son and Holy War

In the politically polarized world, universal ideals are rare. In India, as in many regions, the vacuum is filled by religious zealousness. Minorities are scapegoats of every calamity as nations subdivide into religious and ethnic zones, each seemingly eager to annihilate the other or extinguish itself on the altar of martyrdom. The film explores in two parts the possibility that the psychology of violence against "the other" may lie in male insecurity, itself an inevitable product of the very construction of "manhood."

We Are Not Your Monkeys

(A five minute long film) We Are Not Your Monkeys is a music video that reworks the epic Ramayana story to critique the caste and gender oppression implicit in it. Sung by Sambhaji Bhagat and composed by Sambhaji, Anand and the late Daya Pawar, the music video opposes the systematic oppression and negation of basic human rights in the name of religion and mythology. It is not often that a five minute film subverts a conceptual framework  passed on through the centuries which  such clarity. …Anand Patwardhan's film is an unsettling but liberating and moving experience. It is unsettling because it calls into question ideas passed on through the ages that we have internalized as “truth”. it is liberating  because its relentless logic exposes the contradictions of a self-serving ideology. And it is moving because it is the clear voice of people we rarely hear.

In Memory of Friends

In Memory of Friends documents the violence in Punjab, and does not spare state terrorism. The film concentrates on the legacy of Bhagat Singh, a young socialist hanged by the British in 1931 at age 23. Today the State eulogizes him. A band of brave Sikhs and Hindus carry Bhagat Singh's secular legacy from village to village.

A Time to Rise co-produced with Jim Monro