Deepa Mehta on her film ‘Anatomy of Violence’ about 2012 gang rape in Delhi

TORONTO – Deepa Mehta was in New Delhi visiting her mother in 2012 when news broke of a horrific gang rape there.

Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old medical student, was raped and beaten by six men for hours on a moving bus she was on with a male friend. She died two weeks later as a result of massive injuries sustained in the attack.

“There’s something that’s so visceral about this experience, about the thought of a young woman in a moving bus being gang-raped, and the bus is going around an area of Delhi, passing six police posts and nothing happens,” Mehta, who grew up in New Delhi, said in a recent interview.

“What was horrific about the whole process was that they threw the young couple out of the bus naked and it took some time for the police to come and get them.”

“Anatomy of Violence,” which starts screening at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday, is a fictional dramatization of the lives of the rapists.

The intent is to initiate a dialogue about the systemic issues, like misogyny and patriarchy, that lead to such violence and breed such individuals, said the acclaimed Indo-Canadian filmmaker.

“I do hope that it brings up discussion about how society is complicit in how we bring up our children, the kind of education they have, the glass ceiling and how important equality is,” said the writer-director of the Oscar-nominated “Water.”

Mehta said she also hopes to elicit a sense of empathy for the rapists.

“I don’t feel compassion for them because they made a choice and they have to be responsible for that choice and that choice is a horrific, brutal choice,” she said.

“I just think that if they hadn’t been brought up the way they were, that girl would not be a victim, she would not be dead. That’s food for thought, so why are people afraid of feeling that we’re responsible for them being the way they are?

“You have to own up to it, otherwise there will always be the monsters, and monsters are so easy to dismiss. But if the monster is your brother, that’s a problem.”

“Anatomy of Violence” has a raw feel, with largely improvised scenes in New Delhi depicting the lives of the rapists from childhood onward. Some of them experience childhood trauma including molestation, rape and abuse by family members, as well as poverty.

Mehta said she initially wanted to make a scripted feature and went to New Delhi to hold improv sessions to come up with storylines. But as they started filming the improv workshops, she realized the material was too powerful to abandon.

“I think it was the second day where I thought, ‘I really don’t want to go back, put the script together and cast professional actors from Bollywood and do a film about the rapists,’ because it felt dishonest because what was evolving in front of me was very organic,” she said.

The film also gives a dramatized look at the life of the victim but doesn’t depict the actual rape.

“I have no desire to re-victimize the victim,” said Mehta. “It’s not about that poor young woman. It’s about what we make, these guys, these brutal rapists.”

It’s also not just a film about what’s going on in India, she added.

“Yes, this is a very particular story, the context is the gang rape that happened in India in 2012, but it’s totally universal,” said Mehta. “It happened in Brazil a few months ago, it happens in Canada all the time.

“And let’s not kid ourselves, rape knows no class — rich people rape — it knows no geographic boundaries. It is based on patriarchy, power, misogyny, how we bring up our kids. It’s the lack of equality, that’s what we have to talk about.”