Director Hossein Martin Fazeli came to Canada as a refugee from post-revolution Iran. Here, in his own words, he explains why Phoolan Devi’s story became his.
What excites me about Phoolan is not just her story — it’s the raw defiance of the human spirit against impossible odds. How far can a person rise when the world has written them off? How loud can dignity roar when it has been stolen? Phoolan Devi answers these questions with her life: brutally, boldly, unforgettably.
She was born into extreme poverty and abuse, a girl the world expected to stay silent, to accept her place at the bottom. She did neither. She fought back, demanded recognition, and defied forces far stronger, far crueler than herself. Her vengeance was justice; her survival was revolution.
Making this film has a strong personal dimension for me as well. I was born in Iran and came to Canada as a refugee at the end of the 80s. In post-revolution Iran, I experienced injustice firsthand. I lost members of my family to firing squads for political “crimes” as petty as distributing banned opposition papers or joining human rights groups. I know what it means to be denied dignity because of having a different opinion, ideology, or belief.
Phoolan Devi was denied dignity because she belonged to a “different” caste, a “different” class, and a “different” sex. The underlying mechanisms of oppression in my past experience and in Phoolan’s life are the same. In the end, it doesn’t matter why you are denied humanity. The act itself is unjustifiable. And so, for me, making this film is a personal journey through which I revisit the dark corners of my past to shed light on—and hopefully defend—what I believe to be the unalienable right every human being is born with: the right to be treated with respect and dignity.
We have already been to India four times and interviewed all of our key interviewees who knew Phoolan personally. These include members of her family, bandits who worked with her or were members of her gang, leading journalists and women’s rights activists, as well as some of the people who were subjected to her acts of rage and vengeance. We are now at the rough-cut stage.
This is an important film—in a world where hundreds of millions of people live in sub-human conditions. As human beings, our fates are connected. What happens in a far and “forgotten” corner of the planet affects us all. No infectious disease stays in the area of its origin; it spreads. The same is true of social ills. None of us can be happy living in an “affluent” society when two billion people around us live on less than a dollar a day. None of us can call ourselves “safe” when millions of women around us are subjected to brutal acts of abuse.
It is in such a world that people like Phoolan Devi remind us of the need to act, and give us the hope and courage to carry on.
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