Coming to PBS’s Independent Lens tonight, Monday, November 3: POWERLESS
Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa’s look at a literal power struggle in India had its premiere at Berlin last year. It went on to screen at Tribeca, CPH:DOX, IDFA, Dubai, Melbourne, Zurich, and Vienna, among others.
The impoverished Indian city of Kanpur is the setting for a morally ambiguous and not wholly satisfactory tale of haves and have-nots, centered on access to electricity. On one side is Loha, a self-styled Robin Hood who risks his own safety to reroute power from legal connections to the homes of those who could never hope to afford it. On the other is Ritu Maheshwari, the first female CEO of local power company KESCo, who sees this theft hurting her bottom line. The often surprisingly well-shot film details a cat-and-mouse game between the two, as Loha scoffs at Maheshwari’s attempts to crackdown on his actions, willfully or naively ignoring – to a frustrating degree for the viewer – that what he’s doing is clearly theft that ultimately threatens to dismantle the supply of power for everyone.
what (not) to doc 