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Poster for The Courtesans of Bombay
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Released
1983 · FILM

The Courtesans of Bombay

Directed by
Runtime
74 min
Documentary

Synopsis

In the Mumbai, India, tenement community of Pavanpul, young female courtesans sing, dance, and perform sexual favors for male clientele. Directors James Ivory and Ismail Merchant blend documentary footage and dramatic reenactments in their exploration of this seamy underworld, the flip side of the Bollywood film industry, where aspiring actors and dancers—some even sold into prostitution by their own families—end up, with their innocence lost and their hopes for movie stardom shattered.

Credits

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 8

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Amit BoseShot by Vishnu Mathur

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