INTERVIEW WITH FILMMAKER RAHUL ROY was conducted during Film South Asia 1997 By Sushma Joshi RR: I got involved in gender issues by accident. I had a lot of friends in college, when I was doing my BA - some of my women friends who were feminists were doing a street play and they wanted a "man". So they sort of roped me in. And then gradually what happened was that the groups got involved in various sorts of protests and issues. Then I got into TV and film school and did my Masters there. Immediately after that, I started working with my - at that time my girlfriend, now I am married to her - and most of her films were around gender issues. But somehow, throughout, I was very uncomfortable. And by gender issues, I mean basically women's issues. I was extremely unhappy throughout. I couldn't understand what I was so uncomfortable with. It was after almost five, six years - more - that what was actually bothering me was that my involvement with women's issues - ...

INTERVIEW WITH ANAND PATWARDHAN DURING FILM SOUTH ASIA 1997 By Sushma Joshi INT: How did you start making films? AP: Partly by accident. I had a scholarship where I was studying in America, in 1970, in Brandeis University. It was the time of the Vietnam War. We were organizing against the War in our university. There were lots of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations so I borrowed equipment from the theatre department - although that wasn't what I was studying, I was studying sociology. But, as part of the anti-war effort, I filmed some of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. That's when I began. 1971 was also the time when millions of refugees were coming from Bangladesh - although it wasn't Bangladesh yet, it was East Pakistan. We organized a hunger fast for a day in our university to send the money to the refugees. I made my first completed film then, asking people whether they were eating or not on that day. That film was called Business as Usual, because we foun...