Spotlight On Asia

In this week’s look at Asia, we hear about a film which had its release delayed in India for six months by the censorship board. It’s called Lipstick Under My Burkha and it screened in Paris this month at the South Asian Film Festival. Rosslyn Hyams has been talking to the film's director. Lipstick Under My Burkha is a feminist film of the most watchable kind.Director Alankrita Shrivastava says "the title is a metaphor for women's hidden desires, hidden dreams".Her Hindi-language film shot in Bhopal opened the fifth South Asian Film Festival in Paris in October.It had previously been shown in France at the Créteil Womens' Film Festival.She struggled for more than six months before getting approval for release in India after a screening at the Bombay Festival in November 2016."They said it was too much from the female perspective," she explains. "It may have threatened the patriarchal norm. But India is still a functioning democracy. So we were able to have the ban lifted."Related issues were raised by one or