FAQ

Miss Lovely was shot on location in Mumbai, India.

The film was written by Ashim Ahluwalia, with a screenplay by Ashim Ahuwalia and Uttam Sirur.

The Indian censor board originally insisted on 157 cuts for the film to be approved for release in India. The director spent over a year resisting and appealing for the cuts to be reduced, eventually brining the total number of cuts down to just over 4. This process was documented by the New York Times in a piece titled, "The Journey of 'Miss Lovely' from Cannes to the Censors."

Miss Lovely had a world premiere in the official selection of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It had a North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013, followed by a European premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Miss Lovely is available on itunes, YouTube Premium, Mubi, IFFR Unleashed and Amazon Prime (select territories only)

Miss Lovely was shot on a combination of Fuji Film Super 16mm and Kodak 35mm motion picture film.

The Special Edition Blu-Ray of Miss Lovely is available via boutique German distributor Rapid Eye Movies with English and German subtitles. It includes a special edition booklet and liner notes on the film.

Miss Lovely performed modestly at the India and US box office but was seen as a critical success despite it's experimental form and unconventional story-telling style. Ever since it's world premiere at Cannes, it's influence has become apparent on a whole generation of Indian films, particularly the film's gritty on-location atmospherics, stylised production design, complex sound and deep colour cinematography.

It's influence on the world of Indian film soundtracks cannot be underestimated, particularly the choice of using original, un-remixed 1980s tracks by artists such as Nazia Hassan and Bappi Lahiri and forgotten soundtracks from past films from composers such as Ilaiyaraaja and Egisto Macchi.

The Guardian recently credited the soundtrack of Miss Lovely for the re-discovery of forgotten disco queen Rupa Biswas.

Miss Lovely introduced actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui in his first lead role, and was one of the first film to champion a host of non-traditional casting choices, including real pimps, struggling actors and escorts, playing themselves. It's combination of documentary methods and fictional filmmaking, engaging vintage Bollywood tropes, has been often emulated.

The film constantly switches between genre pieces and is part hard-boiled film noir, part love story, part melodrama and part documentary.

Shyam Ramsay did lash out at 'Miss Lovely' for what he considered a "wrong portrayal" in an Indian Express article. He said that the Ramsays feel victimized. "We were targeted, made to look like cheap sex peddlers in 'Miss Lovely'."

The director Ashim Ahluwalia's response was that he "felt flattered" that the Ramsay's watched his film, and despite loving their work, the film wasn't about them at all. "It was about the sex horror filmmakers who made pornographic "c" grade films in the 1980s, and the Ramsay's were way too mainstream to fit that bill."

Ironically, Ahluwalia wrote an introduction to the first ever book about them, Don't Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers by Shamya Dasgupta, and is interviewed in the documentary Kings of Horror by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh. A review of the documentary in Scroll mentions that, "Ashim Ahluwalia provides the most consistently fascinating insights about the impact of the Ramsay movies. "