Lydia Dean Pilcher is well aware of the time difference between Mumbai and New York, as was made obvious by the convenient slot she schedul...
Lydia Dean Pilcher is well aware of the time difference between Mumbai and New York, as was made obvious by the convenient slot she scheduled for this phone interview. The American producer has been visiting India for the past 25 years to work on international co-productions, notably the films of Mira Nair. Pilcher’s credits include Nair’s Mississippi Masala (their first collaboration, back in 1991), Vanity Fair, The Namesake, Queen of Katwe and, most recently, the web series A Suitable Boy.
Crew members on A Suitable Boy, which was recently streamed in India, joked that Pilcher had more local productions to her name than they had, she told Scroll.in.
So it doesn’t seem surprising that there’s a bit of India in Pilcher’s first solo feature as a director. A Call To Spy explores the courage of three real-life women who were a part of the British campaign against Adolf Hitler’s Germany during World War II. Among the spies who were smuggled into France to aid the French Resistance against the occupying Nazi forces was Noor Inayat Khan, the daughter of an Sufi preacher and musician from India and an American mother.
Her father, Inayat Khan, was a descendant of the Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan. Noor Inayat Khan grew up in France and later lived in England. She trained as a...
