LOS ANGELES (AP) – In December 2012, a 23-year-old medical student on the brink of a new life went to a movie with a friend. Within two weeks, she was dead of horrific injuries she suffered that night in a gang rape.
The tragedy is given careful and wrenching examination in “India’s Daughter,” a potent documentary that’s unsparing in detailing both Jyoti Singh’s assault and the corrosive social and cultural attitudes that, as filmmaker Leslee Udwin sees it, share culpability with her attackers.
“They are not monsters, they are human,” she said. “They’ve been programmed by what they’ve seen around them, what they’ve been told a good girl is, what manhood is…. They are not rotten apples in a barrel – the barrel itself is rotten.”
It was the Indian public’s outburst of anger over the attack, with Singh made an immediate symbol of the nation’s too-often unanswered violence against women, that propelled TV and movie producer Udwin to take on her first documentary.
“India’s Daughter,” which includes Susan Sarandon among its executive producers, airs 10 p.m. EST Monday on PBS’ “Independent Lens.”