Porn, Bollywood, a Book, and Now a Documentary for Sunny Leone

‘Mostly Sunny’ will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.

So the latest Sunny Leone film is going to be a… documentary. Yes, that unlikely genre is the next frontier for the Indo-Canadian entertainer who has already made her presence felt in porn films, Penthouse, reality television, adult cinema and now in mainstream Indian cinema as well. Mostly Sunny, a documentary film directed by Indo-Canadian filmmaker Dilip Mehta, will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.

In an interview, Mehta said he was initially hesitant when approached by a Canadian producer to helm the project about someone who was “the fourth year running the most Googled celebrity in India”. But a visit to India and meeting with Leone changed his mind.

I didn’t really know what Sunny was about, till I… met up with her and I said I’ll do this under one condition – it’s a warts and all film, so there’s no holding back because otherwise it’s pointless. And she said that she also wanted to have a precise attitude to it, it was not going to be a fluff piece on Sunny Leone, the emerging actor.

Dilip Mehta, Indo-Canadian filmmaker

Shooting with her was “amazing”, Mehta added.

Project Explores Changing Indian Attitudes

The film looks at Leone’s life right from her childhood as the daughter of strict Sikh parents in the Canadian small town of Sarnia, nearly 300 kilometres from Toronto, to her racy career path and remarkable transition to the Indian film industry. It doesn’t shy away from her personal relationships, with her parents, and her husband Daniel Weber.

It also deals with tough choices she made in her life, her relationship with her father and her mother, how her choices affected them. It’s particularly touching when she talks about her father, how her relationship with him developed.

Steve Gravestock, TIFF programmer

For Mehta, the project was also an opportunity to explore changing Indian attitudes and mores, illustrated by its audience’s acceptance of a former porn actress in mainstream entertainment. As Piers Handling, the Director and CEO of TIFF, said:

I think it gives you a sense of the new India, actually. Dilip’s film makes some very interesting points about how the English influence, Victorianism, kind of pervaded Indian society but wasn’t actually part of their culture, so this is kind of an interesting return to maybe India’s natural attitude towards sex and sexuality.

Gravestock went on to say that, “Ironically, I think that people have been more welcoming within India than have been outside, or in Sarnia where she grew up.”

‘Mostly Sunny’ Contains a Few Surprises

Mehta admitted Leone’s success in India had surprised him as well. “This is what is amazing is that in India today we’re having some huge issues about intolerance, about beef etc, etc. And just a week ago she was singing the national anthem and I say to myself, ‘Wow, hang on, we’ve got it wrong, we are a very, very tolerant nation’. You have a former adult star who stands up and sings the national anthem, I think that says it all, doesn’t it?”

A counterpoint to Mehta’s film and its look at attitudes towards women in India, will be provided, ironically, by his sister Deepa Mehta’s film Anatomy of Violence, that will also have its world premiere at TIFF. Her film, based on the infamous Nirbhaya rape case of 2012, is, according to TIFF, a “devastating fictional dramatisation of the lives of the rapists”.

Mostly Sunny was shot in several locations including India, Canada, Malaysia, England and the US. TIFF’s Gravestock promises, “It does contain a few surprises, it goes in ways you wouldn’t necessarily think.”

(Indira Kannan is a senior journalist currently based in Toronto.)