“Bold, unconventional, hugely talented and very beautiful – the painter Amrita Sher-Gil is the stuff that legends are made of. ‘Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others. India belongs only to me’, declared the daughter of a Hungarian opera singer and a Sikh aristocrat four years before her premature tragic death. She died in 1941. She was 28 years old. Hers is an unfinished project, but today Amrita Sher-Gil is an icon of Indian modern art. Intuitively cosmopolitan, she navigated with ease the deep waters between Europe and South Asia. She once wrote: ‘It always surprises me to hear that those who can recognise the good in Western art are unable to do so as regards Eastern art. To me it seems incredible. But perhaps this is due to my double atavism’.”

This is the opening statement on-camera for the 37-minute film made for the exhibition “Amrita Sher-Gil – a Family of Artists in the 20th Century” that showed at the Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany from October 2, 2006 to January 8, 2007. Later the exhibition and the film moved to London where they were shown at the Tate Modern from February 26, 2007 to April 30, 2007.

Navina Sundaram born in 1945, grew up and studied in Delhi/India. Ever since 1970 she has worked as a political television editor-cum-reporter and as foreign correspondent for  North German Radio & Television in Hamburg. In her capacity as filmmaker, roving correspondent, news-reporter, anchor woman, she worked for programmes on the national network-like “Weltspiegel”, “Gesichter Asiens”,”, “Panorama”, “Extra Drei”. She has also made scores of documentary films. She has reported from Europe, Africa, South-East Asia and South Asia. From 1992 – 1993 she was foreign correspondent and head of the South Asia Television Studio in New Delhi. Navina Sundaram today lives and works as a television journalist and independent film-maker in Germany.