Partition

By Ken Mc Mullen
78 min.

Based on Urdu writer’s Saadat Hussan Manto’s story about the partition of India and Pakistan. McMullen’s film focuses on the historical footnote that inmates of lunatic asylums, like prisoners were transferred to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistan asylums were sent to India. McMullen and co-writer Tariq Ali’s adaptation is ambitious; the asylum becomes a reverse mirror for the seeming order of the political order, and the same actors, for emphasis play both the lunatics and the rulers.