Soniya Kirpalani, a 47 year-old filmmaker from India, received a $5,000 award for her project “17 Not-Required Indians”

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

17 Indian workers in the United Arab Emirates have been sentenced to death for the killing of a Pakistani worker in March, 2009. Investigation shows that they were tortured, forced to sign confessions, and that evidence in court was doctored. In June 2010, human rights lawyers revealed the Indian Embassy’s darkest secret: 1730 Indian citizens working in the UAE languish behind bars, approximately 300 on death row! The sentencing patterns are strange — 16 men on death row for murder of one; eight men for murder of another. But the Indian Embassy refuses to intervene. For the UAE, a nation where eighty percent of the residents are expatriates who live in harmony with the twenty percent who are citizens, these cases are a challenge to justice.

Using two interwoven story lines, one shot in UAE, the other in India, the film follows the trial through contradictory views, revealing a poker game where the jackpot is truly ‘life or death’. Two brothers of the accused, trying to build proof of innocence, take us into labour camps, where we discover a dark side of UAE society. Visiting with the workers’ families in India we discover their struggle to get by. Pyarelal, a 70 year-old English tutor, whose daily life is a battle against poverty and his loss of eyesight, now struggles to save his son. Ranjeet Kaur, a 24 year-old uneducated housewife, stands up to politicians and begins a campaign to save the men. Finding strength in numbers, these people keep the case alive between trials.