“I’d spend time with the cops for two or three months, gathering research, go home to Toronto and just sit in a room and cry,” he says. He was living between Toronto and Delhi then. The horrific detail of the police reports was, of course, disturbing. He proceeded slowly and with trepidation. “It’s about a real case real people were affected and there were real victims.” “This is not stuff I was going to make up,” he says. Accuracy was crucial to the project – an extremely sensitive subject, still raw in the mind of the nation – so he worked closely with police, interviewing detectives and reviewing their files. The majority of the six years Mehta spent making Delhi Crime was devoted to research. and India – including women – who “took a real stand” (photo by Arsh Sayed/Netflix) Mehta says it was initially tough to find supporters for the project, but that he ultimately found a group of producers and financiers in the U.S. People have this perception of the dangers that women face, which is not unfounded, but at the same time, it’s an environment where you come face-to-face with a kind of courage you’ve never seen before.” “I thought it just turned the whole story about India on its head. “They were real-life superheroes,” he says. Mehta got to know the officers over the course of several years. A family friend connected him to a former police commissioner who introduced the filmmaker to the investigation team and to the woman who led it.

“The investigation was led by women,” Mehta says, “so essentially, it’s about the women who are trying to solve this incredibly vast problem of violence against women in the most heinous sense.” The Netflix series tells the story of the Delhi police investigation that led to the apprehension of the six perpetrators of the gang rape and murder. Mehta, who is now based in London, won the International Emmy Award for best drama series last month for Delhi Crime, which he wrote and directed.

I was a part of it, experiencing the same frustration and sadness.” “The crime changed the country’s psyche forever. The 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in the national capital territory shook India to its core, making headlines around the world.Īs details emerged 'over the course of several days your whole understanding of what a human being could do to another human being was altered,” says Mehta, an alumnus of the University of Toronto Mississauga, who recalled the protests, riots and re-writing of laws. Filmmaker Richie Mehta was finishing a project in Delhi when the Nirbhaya (Hindi for “fearless) case broke out.

Delhi crime emmy