Research Seminar

18 Jan 2017

Dr Michael Lawrence (Sussex)

Monday 23 January, 4 pm

Film and Screen Media Auditorium, Kane Building B10B

Abstract: Between 2007 and 2015 Darsheel Safary (b. 1996) enjoyed or perhaps endured an  inevitably brief tenure as the most popular and successful child star working in Bollywood, the commercial entertainment industry based in Mumbai, India. Safary appeared to embody India’s accelerated imbrication in global capitalism and consumerism in a particularly appealing because thoroughly “cute” mode. This talk will examine Safary’s popular image in the Indian media and address in particular the child star’s face as it appears in two films – the Disney production Zokkomon and Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children – in order to explore this child star’s relationship with processes of transformation – both the cultural changes associated with globalization in India and the physical changes associated with Safary’s own adolescence.