Review by dibeyendu

The Saints of Sin tells the stories of 7 women, each representing one of Christianity's 7 deadly sins. Beginning with wrath, where a woman recounts being molested by her older brother as a child and her mother's denial of what was going on, and ending with envy, where a transgender person talks of how she's always envied women, the film's structure is its greatest strength. I loved the 1995 movie "Se7en" and though this is a documentary and not a thriller, it is gripping all the same. The director, advertising film maker Aniruddha Sen, is a Bengali and so are the women featured in the movie, though they live in different parts of the world. The film has occasional Bengali dialogue and some beautiful music, folk songs and songs of Rabindranath Tagore, rendered on-screen (as opposed to background music) by very talented singers. My favorite segment is Sloth, which depicts a pretty middle aged Bengali housewife mulling her laziness. She doesn't make breakfast for her kids, she doesn't look after the house, but lets others do it for her. This is probably the lightest and most entertaining segment (it's hard to seriously think of sloth as a sin, especially if you're a Bengali). I hope this movie is more widely viewed. At the Little Theatre at National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai, where I watched it, the audience wasn't large, but everyone who was there seemed to enjoy themselves immensely.