Pamela Rooks
| Pamela Rooks | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Pamela Juneja 1958 Kolkata, India |
| Died | 1 October 2010 New Delhi, India |
| Occupation | film director, screenwriter |
| Years active | 1992–2005 |
Pamela Rooks (1958 – 1 October 2010) was an Indian film director and screenwriter, most known for the film, Train to Pakistan (1998) set in Partition of India and based on Khushwant Singh's novel; it was screened at several international film festivals. Apart from that accomplishment she also made award-winning films like, Miss Beatty's Children (1992) and Dance Like a Man (2003) and several documentaries.
She was born Pamela Juneja in an Army household to Col. A. N. Juneja and Gudi Juneja. She did her schooling in boarding schools in Nainital and Shimla, where she became interested in dramatics. Later, while studying mass communication in Delhi in the 1970s, she was involved with Delhi-based theatre group, Theatre Action Group (TAG), which was founded by theatre director, Barry John and Siddharth Basu, Roshan Seth, Lilette Dubey, and Mira Nair amongst others.
She started her career as a journalist and producer of current affairs programmes on television and it was during this period, for an interview, that she met director Conrad Rooks who had received much acclaim for his film, Siddhartha (1972). Subsequently they went on to marry.
Later this paved the way for her career as a documentary filmmaker and she made critically acclaimed documentaries, such as Chipko: A response to the forest crisis, Girl Child: fighting for survival, Punjab: a human tragedy and Indian cinema: the winds of change, before making her first feature film, Miss Beatty's Children (1992), based on a novel of the same name by her. The film won her the Indira Gandhi Award for Best First Film of a Director at the National Film Award. Then in 1998 came her much anticipated film based on writer Khushwant Singh's historical novel, Train to Pakistan (1956), set in the Partition of India in 1947, while previous attempts by other people to turn the novel into film had failed. The film ran into trouble with the Indian Censor Board, but was eventually released after going to a tribunal where only a few audio cuts were made.
...
Wikipedia