As a sort of follow-up to his older sister Deepa Mehta’s Water—which looked at the plight of widows in India circa 1938—Dilip Mehta’s documentary The Forgotten Woman aims to put real faces on widows similar to those depicted in that Oscar-nominated Canadian film.

The movie, which opens in Vancouver on Friday (April 25), is a meandering journey through the ashrams and streets of Vrindavan, the final resting place for many widows, who, essentially, go there to die.

Photographer turned filmmaker Mehta—who was born and educated in India but moved to Toronto in the 1980s to help found Sunrise Films with his sister—lets his lyrical camerawork and subjects tell their sometimes heart-wrenching stories of poverty and neglect, which aren’t easy on the eyes. The film depicts the most marginalized people in Indian society, widows who are abandoned by their families and relatives once their husbands die.

Although the film focuses on the widows, it also comes across as an indictment of modern India’s failure to eradicate widespread poverty despite the country’s emergence as an economic power. It implicates India’s failure to move away from centuries-old feudal caste/class systems that denigrate its marginalized citizens, particularly women and children.

Reached in New Delhi, Mehta said the film isn’t a direct offshoot from Water but came from the situation of millions of widows in modern India, whose lives can be even worse than depicted in his sister’s film, for which he was associate producer.

Mehta could have framed the widows’ sad and painful stories in the context of the disparity between modern India’s sprawling, swanky suburbs and the human degradation that still grips much of rural India, shaped by old social values and by government and social neglect. Mehta, though, said he did not want to make a political film but rather to focus on the marginalization of India’s widows and the devastating effect it has on their lives and the lives of their children.

“I agree with you that poverty and general neglect of its marginalized citizens remain India’s biggest obstacles to its modern status on the world stage,” Mehta told the Georgia Straight. “I hope my film brings awareness to the plight of these women, and certainly something should be done…but that can only happen when we as a society take action.”

An accomplished photographer who shot his first Time magazine cover at age 24, Mehta has worked for such publications as National Geographic, Newsweek, Figaro, Stern, London’s Sunday Times, and the New York Times. He was also a stills photographer for the Vancouver-shot TV series Danger Bay in the late 1980s, when Deepa directed four episodes of the family show.

Mehta says making the transition to filmmaking has been seamless for him given that he has been on many film sets as a photographer, producer, and production manager. But he isn’t sure about the future of his new role as a film director.

“I’m an artist who wants to try many different things, and filmmaking is an extension of the things I have been doing all my life,” he said. “If you say will I make another documentary or another film—I don’t know the answer yet. I will let inspiration guide me to my next artistic venture.”