Gillian Anderson is shooting with Oscar winning director Jeffrey Brown for a film on trafficking

Kolkata seems to have caught the fancy of Oscar-winning director Jeffrey D Brown, who has been spotted shooting his first fiction feature film at different locales in the City of Joy. Actress Gillian Anderson of The X Files fame joined the film’s cast and crew three days ago. Jeffrey has been in the city for nearly 25 days. Gillian will be staying on for around 20 days as per the film’s first schedule.

A crew member revealed, “Jeffrey’s film is about sex trafficking in India. He is following the story of a 13-year-old girl who had been smuggled into a red-light area of the city. Tilottama Shome, who played Prosenjit Chatterjee’s wife in Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai is part of the crew and so is a young Assamese girl called Nihar Saikia.”

Gillian plays a photographer who has come down to document life in India when she comes across the young girl, said the crew member.

The picture alongside (shot by the film’s photographer) has the director shooting beside the Kashi Mitra Ghat, a crematorium in North Kolkata.

Recounting the experience, the crew member said, “We were shooting a scene where we were worshipping the Goddess Kali, and this is the place where Gillian first discovers the girl who is a victim of the flesh trade. There are a few action scenes where Gillian tries to rescue the girl from the clutches of her captors.” Jeffrey won the Academy Award for his short film Molly’s Pilgrim (1986) while Gillian won the Golden Globe as Best Actress for her popular TV series The X Files. Additionally, Gillian has frequently made it to the lists of the world’s sexiest women by leading magazines, topping these quite a few times.