Anand Patwardhan's documentary, Prisoners Of Conscience, is about the emergency during Indira Gandhi's regime. It's a film, he says, that is relevant 32 years after it was made because freedom is still dodging the poor

Few filmmakers can claim to understand the Indian judicial system better than Anand Patwardhan. He has had run-ins with our courts for almost as long as he has made political documentaries -- almost 30 years now. These confrontations have been brought about by a number of methods employed to subdue his voice; rather, the messages his work attempts to deliver.

In 1978, Patwardhan released Prisoners of Conscience (Zameer ke Bandi), his record -- filmed in black and white -- of Indira Gandhi's State of Emergency. It was a time when the media was silenced, and a shocking 1,00,000 people imprisoned without trial. On January 15, Alliance Francaise and Vikalp intend to screen the film again. We asked Patwardhan to tell us why people should go watch it.

Zameer ke Bandi was made in 1978. What, according to you, makes it relevant today?
Sadly, my films remain relevant as the injustices they document continue to recur. When the Emergency ended in March 1977, many political prisoners were released but a few hundreds, mainly Naxalites, Nagas and Mizos, continued to rot in jail despite the new government's assurances that all would be released. At the same time, a strong civil liberties movement grew, determined to fight all attempts to curb democracy.
Today, while the urban elite and we in the middle classes can count ourselves lucky that we enjoy many political and other freedoms, the same is not true of people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. For them, an undeclared Emergency continues to deprive them of their rights and, sometimes, of their lives.