Faces of India

A series of half-hour ‘portraits on film’, presenting a cross section of characters from real life, authentic and alive. The camera goes into their homes and becomes part of their environment. With many rare sequences never filmed before, the films demonstrate the power and appeal of a technique in which filming becomes incidental to the life being lived, and the resulting film an organic entity.

The object of Yavar Abbas’s “Face” films is to introduce us to a variety of characters of India. All too often, the outsider looks upon India as a land of countless, anonymous people – a population too vast to allow of any distinct individuality. In these seven films Abbas has set out to draw more sharply the features of a number of personalities from that ‘amorphous mass’.