Pahuja and Derek Rogers hard at work during the filming of the documentary The World Before Her.

Documentary filmmaker and Ossington resident Nisha Pahuja hasn’t been  been spending a lot of time at home these days.

She spent the past four years in India steeped in the culture of her birth. And in the last two months, her work has taken her to red carpets in New York and Toronto.

Pahuja’s new feature film The World Before Her premiered at the prestigious Tribeca film festival and recently won the award for best Canadian feature at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival in May.

The documentary contrasts the wide-eyed ambitions of 20 hand-picked contestants determined to win the Miss India pageant, and the behind-the-scenes reality of Hindu fundamentalist camps for young girls that are run by the women’s wing of a militant movement. The film is a vivid portrayal of what people in India are facing today as their country is influenced and transformed by Western consumer culture.

Although Pahuja admits that living in Toronto had no influence on the making of her film, being here gave her the opportunity to choose her own career path—which she still says would have been hard for her to do in India.

“I’m where most of all North American women are. I very rarely even think of my gender. I’m fortunate that growing up in this county I didn’t have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis. Because I grew up in Canada it was very easy for me to challenge that system and be independent. I demanded my own freedom and took it for myself and basically my parents had to deal with that,” she explains.

But, despite the restrictions for people living in India, she says, here in Canada some women take their freedom for granted. “There are lot of women here that still can’t take their freedom and walk away from abusive relationships,” she says.

Pahuja sees the western influence in India today as something that we should all pay attention to. The cultural shock wave hitting that country has profound implications and has taken hold very quickly.

“Initially in India,” she says, “there was really only one state run television station. Then satellite TV came in and it completely revolutionized the media landscape for the country. You have this rampant consumerism and this media satellite TV invasion where you saw things that you had never seen before and the impact that that’s had has been tremendous. You’ve got the women in the pageant world who have bought into all of this and who desire a lot of the things that the west puts out including freedom and the emancipation of women and then this rampant materialism and then you have the fundamentalists who are reacting against both.”

Pahuja says that she hopes her film sparks a dialog of how we in the west “are shaping the history of people in other countries that we can’t even see. It is important to know that we are changing things but not necessarily always in good ways.”