The World Before Her

In her timely documentary THE WORLD BEFORE HER, which took the top prize at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, filmmaker Nisha Pahuja examines the role of women in India and the stark choices both women and the country itself are being forced to consider.

With the safety of women in India making headlines around the world, Pahuja’s film brings attention to the historical and modern forces that are impacting on the very survival of girls and the rights of women who today are forging their own identities.

THE WORLD BEFORE HER is a tale of two Indias. In one, Ruhi Singh is a small-town girl competing in Bombay to win the Miss India pageant—a ticket to stardom in a country wild about beauty contests. In the other India, Prachi Trivedi is the young, militant leader of a fundamentalist Hindu camp for girls, where she preaches violent resistance to Western culture, Christianity and Islam.

Moving between these divergent realities, the film creates a lively, provocative portrait of the world's largest democracy at a critical transitional moment—and of two women who hope to shape its future.

THE WORLD BEFORE HER was the Best Documentary Feature at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, Best Canadian Feature at the 2012 Hot Docs Film Festival and the Best Foreign Film at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival in 2012.

In partnership with GE FOCUS FORWARD-Short Films, Big Ideas, a curatorial program inspired by GE’s vision of innovative people being the catalyst for world change, DOCURAMA will present a 3-minute short documentary with each feature film that has a complementary theme or subject matter. The Honor Code, from filmmaker Katy Chevigny, will be shown before every screening of THE WORLD BEFORE HER. If we change the way we think about honor, could we make the world a better place? Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah proves we can in The Honor Code. Every screening of THE WORLD BEFORE HER will be followed by a pre-taped Q&A with the director.