My Mother India is a personal documentary in which the director, Safina Uberoi, follows the journey of her Australian mother who married an Indian scholar in the 60's and went to live with him in India: With an Indian father who collects kitsch calendars, an Australian mother who hung her knickers out to dry in front of the horrified Indian neighbors, a grandfather who was a self styled Guru and a grandmother who hated all men equally- it is no wonder that Safina Uberoi chose to make a film about her family! But what begins as a quirky and humorous documentary about an eccentric and multicultural upbringing unfolds into a complex commentary on the social, political and religious events of the anti-Sikh riots in India in 1984 which tore this family apart.

Funded by SBS and the Australian Film Finance Corporation, the film was five years in the making. Safina Uberoi recalls her thoughts and experiences that went into the making of the film.

When you are away from home you see things differently. Leaving India made me see India and myself in a whole new light. First there was the constant nag of memory- in every part of my heart and mind. That longing for a certain friend, the smell of hot jalebi's haunting my nostrils, that sadness when I heard Indian voices on a train…

That was the first stage of my arrival in Sydney almost seven years ago. Then slowly, with those reserves which help us to survive even the pain of exile, I found things I liked about Australia, and I carved a little space for myself under the brittle blue skies. I made short films, pieces of animation, documentaries about old Italian men and testosterone driven teenagers. But when it was time to make the big one, the film which really mattered, I traveled straight back to the place of where all my stories really begin…

My Mother India is a film about my family, not only in the deepest and most personal sense, but also in the broadest and most political sense.

I began by wanting to tell the story of my mother, an Australian woman, who married my father in the sixties and went to live with him in India. I was inspired by a beautiful black and white photograph of the two of them together from this time- My mother is tall, beautiful and blonde. She is wearing one of those sixties dresses stretched tight across strong Aussie thighs. My father stands beside her, handsome in a well-tailored suit, with an Englishman's pipe in his dark Indian hands. Behind them a ship waits to take them India- To a country my father had left sixteen years before, across a sea, which was to separate my mother forever from her home…

I thought there was a moral in this story. Something about traveling between cultures from which an Indian-Australian daughter could learn. So I began to interview my parents and draw pictures of the stories they were telling me. We were half way through filming before it dawned on me that the film was taking me past the eccentricities of a multi cultural upbringing, and into the heart of a deep sadness.

I believe that all Indians feel this sorrow. In some place deep within ourselves we all know we are born of a terrible cleaving. We tore brother from brother and slaughtered the wives of others to make this place we call home. I was trying to make a film about a cross-cultural marriage, but the trains of Partition screamed their way into my story…And from there to 1984 was only a small step.

At the time I started filming My Mother India, fifteen years had transpired since the anti Sikh riots of 1984 that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. And yet, when each member of my family spoke about the time their tears were fresh, their pain like a deep and untouched pool. My sister had been ten years old in 1984. When I interviewed her for the film she was a young woman, but her voice still trembled with the burden of a childhood argument. A school friend said to her that the Sikhs deserved what had happened to them. "But", said my sister's young friend- "I don't mean you personally". To which my sister replied, "But of course you do, you mean me and everyone else like me… nobody is going to ask about me personally before they burn my house down…"

She was ten years old and she was a prophet. For who is thinking personally when they burn children in a carriage, or slaughter a village of weavers, or tear the veil from the faces of women in the name of a political slogan or worse, in the name of God? There is nothing personal about what has happened in Gujarat… Nothing personal except the pain.

People ask me how I could make such a personal film. My reply is that I had no choice. We must make the most personal statement about the politics around us. This is the most truthful statement we can make. My family suffered no loss in 1984: our house remained standing, my father and my brother were not killed, my mother and I were safe. And yet we lost everything. Nothing ever looked the same again. For we had looked into the eyes of Mother India and we had seen the Dark Side…

My Mother India is the very specific story of one family in a particular historical context and yet the audience response been amazing. Australians who have no connection with India have been queuing up to see the film. It has won ten major international awards and has been selected to screen nationally in theatres across Australia in October. Why does My Mother India have this universal appeal?

Perhaps it is because there is a time in all our lives, whether we are Indian or Australian, American or Afghan, Serbian or Malaysian, there is a time when what happens to our nation, what happens to our culture, happens to us personally. The broad sweep of newspaper headlines and Parliamentary politics become the stuff of our everyday lives. It is our neighbors who have been slaughtered, it is we who are ignoring the wailing of women in crowded refugee camps. It is our children, going to school in well-ironed uniforms and oversized school bags, it is our children who are learning to hate…

I live in hope and fear of the time I will bring My Mother India to screen in India. Scheduled for November, the screening is sure to arouse questions and challenges, faith and betrayal, sorrow and laughter. It will be like going home at last…

My Mother India has already won ten major awards- including the Premiers Literary Award for Best Screenwriting, the Jury Prize for Best Australian Documentary from the Film Critics Circle of Australia, the award for Best Australian Documentary from the Real Life on Film Documentary Film Festival and the Australian Teachers of Media Awards for Best Australian Documentary. My Mother India also picked up major awards in the Hawaii International Film Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Mill Valley International Film Festival in California and the Rhode Island Film Festival in New York. Recently My Mother India became the toast of the Sydney Film Festival when it picked up two major awards on the opening day. Directed by Safina Uberoi, My Mother India was awarded the highly prestigious Rouben Mamoullian Award for Best Australian Short Film. The highly competitive award is given by a panel of International jurists and previous recipients include major Australian film makers Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, Bob Connolly and Robyn Anderson. My Mother India also won the Community Relations Commission Award on the same day. The film is all set for release in art house theatres across Australia in September.

Safina Uberoi trained at the Mass Communication Research Center in Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. In 1995 she left India to study in the Australian Film Television and Radio School. Her short films made there include the award winning Nonno Peppe is a Video Head and Guru. Safina directed a feature length children's animation for release on CDRom. Her documentaries include Faith for the Foundation For Universal Responsibility and The Brides of Khan as part of a major series of SBS television, Australia. She has taught at the National School of Drama, New Delhi and the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney. My Mother India is her most recent film. Safina also lectures in film and television at Macquarie University in Sydney and is working on a feature film set in an Indian restaurant in Sydney called The Last Temptation With Rice.