Pia Sawhney is angry and her anger is making the New York State Government a bit uncomfortable. Pia Sawhney has poured her angst into an 11-minute film that did the rounds of the 33rd International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands, last month to rave reviews. Difficult to believe that Sawhney is in her early twenties, studying law at the New York State University and has never held a film camera in her life. And yet she did when after 9/11 the US government’s Department of Home and Security orders for the special registration programme. ‘‘Here was a government asking male immigrants from 24 countries to register themselves and detaining them without a trial.’’ Born in Mumbai, Sawhney has spent the better part of her life in India and the Middle-East and moved to the US recently after being accepted in the New York State University’s Law School. ‘‘It was Friday when a friend passed us a pamphlet asking us to participate in a rally to protest the special registration order. That is when we first heard about this and started looking at cases where people were being detained without a trial. Suddenly I was also meeting people who had been detained without a trial and there was no one to tell their stories,’’ she says. Armed with her credit card, conviction and little else, Sawhney and her friend Sanjna Singh decided to tell that story in their film Out of Status. With camera in hand and friends volunteering on their project they found the likes of Salem Jeffer, middle-aged tour guide from Pakistan trying to eke out a living for his family in the US. Jeffer had been picked up by the INS and detained without trial plunging his family into shock and despair for months.
