LSD: Love, Sex aur Dhokha

The film is made of three stories, all presented as camera footage. The first is a film student's graduation project; he is trying to shoot an elopement story across a caste line. The second is a supermarket's security cameras; a relationship between an employee and a woman is recorded and the recording becomes something to sell. The third is a hidden camera; a reporter entraps a performer. The three touch each other. Dibakar Banerjee writes and directs. The whole film was shot on low resolution cameras. The image quality is deliberately poor, the texture of handheld, security and hidden camera is preserved, and there are almost no professional actors. The subject is the image itself. In all three stories somebody is recording and the recording becomes a weapon; the film takes on directly the sting journalism then spreading in India and the recordings leaking online. Caste is handled openly in the first section, and showing it that directly was uncommon in mainstream Indian cinema. It got past the censors with difficulty and cuts were demanded. Banerjee went on making work outside genre, and the film counts as a threshold in Indian independent cinema. Who it is for: viewers who follow formal experiment and Indian independent cinema. Who it is not for: the image quality is tiring to watch, the subjects are heavy, and the three sections differ sharply in tone.