Drowned Out

Drowned Out (2002)

An Indian family choose to stay at home and drown rather than make way for the Narmada Dam.

An Indian family decide to stay at home and drown rather than make way for the Narmada dam Three choices. Move to the slums in the city, accept a place at a resettlement site or stay at home and drown. The people of Jalsindhi in central India must make a decision fast.

Date of release
2002-08-28
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 15m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Franny Armstrong

Casting

Interesting facts

Drowned Out is a 2002 documentary by Franny Armstrong about the Sardar Sarovar Project. Shot over three years, Drowned Out follows one family's stand against a government dam project which is set to destroy their home and their village.

Production

The documentary was shot over three years on three separate trips to India by Franny Armstrong. Assisted by her sister in the first year and by an Australian camera operator in the second, Armstrong shot 80% of the film herself. There was no electricity ‘on location’ so Armstrong used a portable solar charger she purchased in the UK.

Armstrong was put in jail for one night after the first day of filming. As she wrote in a feature article for The Guardian newspaper, she continued to live and work alongside the villagers and found this almost anthropological way of working helped her capture candid interviews; "Most of the best interviews were done in the last year - when I was on my own - because people really got to know and trust me".

In August 2003, the Spanner Films crew returned to Jalsindhi village, where Drowned Out had been shot, to screen the film for the villagers. They made a makeshift cinema on the side of the village school, with a diesel generator for electricity, a bedsheet for a screen and a simple sound system.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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