The Men In The Tree

About the film

In early 1993, Lalit Vachani and the Wide Eye Film team completed a documentary film, The Boy in the Branch. Set at the headquarters of the RSS in Nagpur, the film was about the indoctrination of young Hindu boys by the RSS – the force behind the Hindutva movement in India. Eight years later, Vachani returned to Nagpur to meet the characters from his earlier film. At one level, this is a film about memory. It is a documentary in the form of a personal revisit where a filmmaker returns to the issues, the locations and the subjects of an earlier film. At another level, The Men in the Tree is a political documentary on the RSS and Hindu fundamentalism. It is about some of the individuals, the stories and the myths, the buildings and the branches that enable the growth of the RSS and its Hindutva ideology.

Director Biography

Lalit Vachani is a documentary filmmaker, producer and video editor. whose documentaries include The Starmaker., The Boy in the Branch., The Men in the Tree. and The Play Goes On.. In 2007, he directed In Search of Gandhi as one of ten international filmmakers commissioned to make 52 min. films for the Why Democracy? global television series, which was broadcast across 42 international television channels, including ZDF/Arte in Germany, BBC and BBC World (UK), Arte (France), Canal + (Spain), SBS (Australia), NHK (Japan) and SABC (South Africa).