Ashim Ahluwalia's documentary John and Jane, a statement about the globalised world, runs to full houses at the 56th Berlin Film Festival

John and Jane, a documentary film that was rejected for screening at the recently-concluded Mumbai International Film Festival, has been making waves at the 56th Berlin Film Festival, or the Berlinale. The film about Indian call centre employees at the frontline of globalisation ran to full houses at four screenings in the prestigious film festival’s Forum section.

Director Ashim Ahluwalia, who shot the film over three years, followed the lives of six Indian call centre “agents” trying to sell Americans everything from cheaper phone calls to emergency medical systems.

The filmmaker focuses on the lives of the workers, rather than the business statistics of call centres. For him it’s not just about outsourcing. “It’s about the world as it is today, in a globalised context,” says Ahluwalia, who visualised John and Jane as a science fiction film.

Ahluwalia has created a non-documentary-style film that gives John and Jane a dramatic look. The film starts with shots of New York, moving on to crowded and polluted inner-city Mumbai, and eventually ending up in the Indian metropolis’ futuristic high-rise buildings. “It’s about the in-between spaces like waking and sleeping, between India and America, like your body is in India and mind in America,” explains the filmmaker.

“In one sense it’s a documentary because all the characters are real,” says Ahluwalia. The film’s protagonists give themselves names like ‘John’ and ‘Jane’, and work nights to cater to the demands of a market half a world away. “I started making this film in 2002 when nobody had heard of call centres. All I knew then was it was to be a technological advancement,” he says. 


“But when I heard what the job actually was, it sounded like a sci-fi film to me. I thought it was amazing that there are people who talk into headsets with fake American names and accents all night, and are Indian again by day.”

The film, which appears as a non-fiction piece of work, is shot on 35 mm, unlike most documentaries. “The idea of someone faking an American was to me already acting on the job, and the fiction, non-fiction thing seemed to fit quite nicely.”

Source: DNA, February 18, 2006
             www.newsindia-times.com, February 2006