John & Jane 2005

Documentarian Ashim Ahluwalia deploys the resources of fiction – elegant 35mm cinematography, intricate soundscaping, careful casting – to create this eerie picture of globalised dystopia. His subjects are workers at a Mumbai call centre, young Indian night-shift workers whose imaginative lives are as American as the strangers they earn a living from harassing by phone.

“Globalization gets a human face and outsourcing a spiritual dimension in Ashim Ahluwalia’s semi-staged, sometimes jaw-dropping documentary about life under the harsh fluorescent lights of an Indian call center. John & Jane is a hybrid film in a hybrid world. Spending their nights fielding calls from frantic Americans, the operators indulge their own fantasies about America, take American names along with their virtual identities, and even convert to Christianity.” — J. Hoberman, Village Voice
“An astonishing look at the souls of the outsourced… The lives it depicts are real, but the film’s approach gives those lives the scope of speculative fiction.” — Cameron Bailey, Toronto Film Festival