“While the storyline is fiction, the film has very real settings. We shot the entire film in a village in Haryana, a state which is known for its skewed sex ratio,” says Anand, 42, who was in the city ahead of the nation-wide premiere of her film on December 4. “We cast the village women in the film and even have them speaking from the heart, with no written dialogues to follow. We wanted to keep it as real as possible,” says Anand.

The Hindi film revolves around the story of a rookie journalist in Delhi, who exposes a woman, ‘Kajarya’ believed to embody Goddess Kali, who ritually kills female newborns in a village nearby. ‘Kajarya’ follows the lives of these two women from different backgrounds, as the story explores the condition of women both in rural and urban India through a different perspective.

“What was most shocking for me during my research for the film was that female foeticide was as rampant in cities where people are supposedly educated, as it is in villages,” says Anand, who adds that it was an interview she read in a newspaper that inspired her to make the film. “The interview I read was that of a mid-wife who says at the end that she thinks of herself as a hangman, who merely kills newborns who were sentenced to die by their parents. That made me want to explore this issue,” says Anand.