The Miscreants of Taliwood (Pakistan, 2009) dir. George Gittoes

From Australian artist and documentarian George Gittoes comes an impassioned and truly urgent film about the struggle against the Taliban. Gittoes becomes fascinated with the cheap, melodramatic films churned out in the frontier areas of Pakistan. These films are full of snarling villains, comic midgets and dancing heroines. Their absurd violence seems to hold a crazy mirror up to what is happening all around, but they are ruthlessly opposed by the truly violent religious hardliners who see them as an affront to Islam. For Gittoes, the makers of these films are the true heroes of art, risking everything for the right to exercise their creative imaginations. He plunges into their world by financing, and even starring in, ’Taliwood’ films shot under the most dangerous of conditions. It is a journey which mixes the merely bizarre with the truly horrific.