Riding the Tiger

Mike Singh was born in North Carolina to an Indian Sikh father and an American mother, grew up in India at a boarding school in the Himalayas, and was in Delhi in October and November 1984 when Indira Gandhi was assassinated and mobs killed thousands of Sikh men across the city. Because he could pass as non-Sikh, because his hair was cut and his accent was American, he was able to walk into the mob with a hidden tape recorder and a movie camera. What he recorded is part of this film. The young Sikh man he saw burning alive is not.

The film moves through personal history, political history, and the specific horror of being a witness to events that your government is trying to prevent anyone from seeing. Riding the Tiger is simultaneously a memoir, a political document, and a portrait of the 1984 violence as experienced from the inside. It includes testimony from those who sheltered Sikh refugees in their compound as the mobs circled, and from survivors who climbed over walls with their children to escape. It's one of the most unflinching accounts of that period ever put on film.