by REED JOHNSON
“It’s the kind of film where you’re laughing and wondering, ‘Should I be laughing?'” said Anusha Rizvi, who wrote “Peepli Live,” her first feature film, and co-directed it with her historian husband, Mahmood Farooqui. She was speaking by Skype from New Delhi, the Indian capital, where she lives and has built her career as an independent documentary filmmaker and former television producer at NDTV, India’s preeminent news channel.
Befitting Rizvi’s journalistic background, “Peepli Live” was inspired by real-life contemporary events: the economic shakeup of India’s agrarian society and a horrifying wave of suicides by poor Indian farmers. According to government statistics cited in the film, 182,000 farmers took their own lives between 1997 and 2007. Additionally, between 1991 and 2001, 8 million Indians quit farming altogether.
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