Though many activities in Indian public life have been dominated by men, there is one where women have led the way – playback singing in Bollywood music. Yet in recent years, even that has changed: the melodious voices you hear in the top movies have become increasingly male.

AHLUWALIA: […] By that point this whole globalization thing was happening with call centers. India was being seen as the next big thing. I thought, “That’s weird because as far as I can see these guys have pretty horrible jobs, fourteen, fifteen hours all night.” And I am reading this very excited, enthusiastic, business press talking about all these people that are going to be liberated by capitalism. I just thought it sounds like a bad dystopian sci-fi. It sounds like all the Hollywood sci-fi I loved as a kid. So I started working on that. And that was much easier to get funding for. Although it was supposed to be about call centers it became more about the psychology of what it means to be a fake American and what does it mean for all of us to become fake Americans?

MAZUMDAR: John and Jane is a documentary, Miss Lovely is a fictionalized narrative yet in John and Jane you use enactment. In Miss Lovely your aesthetic is primarily driven by a documentary that could not be. Could you say something about the tension between documentary and fiction?

AHLUWALIA: When I wanted to make John and Jane it had the shadow of a 1970s sci-fi film. I said, “What if I made a film which was science-fiction but it’s now, and you use real people to play themselves?” And I wanted to shoot it on celluloid—which meant I had very limited footage. It couldn’t be a cinema verité documentary. It had to be very scripted. The cameraman was like, “It’s like you’re shooting this like Nanook of the North or something.” It’s really old school with a big 35 camera, it’s not “fly on the wall” at all, it’s all composed, it’s all static shots. For me that was interesting: what makes something a documentary, is it just the form? Like, if it’s a hand held digital camera then it’s a documentary but if I shoot it beautifully composed on 35, then it’s suddenly fiction.