In 2017, an accusation of witchcraft upended the lifetime of Anaben Pawar, an aged tribal lady dwelling in a rural village within the Indian state of Gujarat. In Testimony of Ana, Pawar recollects how, following the accusation, villagers paid a witch hunter to carry out a brutal ‘ritual’ that left her badly injured and deeply traumatised. With out the sources to flee and with little assist from the native police, she and her household proceed to stay in a perpetual state of anger and worry. The Indian-born, US-based filmmaker Sachin Dheeraj provides each highly effective storytelling and very important reporting together with his work. By way of Pawar’s haunting, brave phrases, the movie spotlights how a unstable mixture of poverty, superstition and deeply engrained sexism permits these witch hunts – accountable for greater than 1,500 deaths between 2010 and 2021 – to persist within the nation.
