Mumbai: Gruesome, sexist and sometimes senseless crimes committed in the Indian capital seem to have inspired award-winning Indo-Canadian filmmaker Richie Mehta to write and direct a series. 

Delhi Crime,  a seven-part police-procedural thriller, produced by Golden Karavan and Ivanhoe Pictures, will premiere worldwide at Sundance Film Festival on January 29 followed by a launch on streaming giant Netflix. Over six years of research has gone into making the series and the Season 1 tells the tale of the Nirbhaya rape case of 2012 that still sends chills down the nation's spine.

The police officer (Vartika Chaturvedi in the series) is sensitively portrayed by Shefali Shah (Monsoon Wedding, Juice), who leads a critically-lauded cast that includes Adil Hussain (Life of Pi, Hotel Salvation), Denzil Smith (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), Rasika Dugal (Qissa, Manto), Rajesh Tailang (Siddharth, Selection Day) and Yashaswini Dayama (Dear Zindagi, The Odds).

Throughout seven hour-long episodes, Delhi Crime captures the complexities of the scrutiny, the emotional toll on the investigating team, and their determination to bring the perpetrators to justice in a fraught environment. 

Considering the series a catharsis of sorts for the country, Mehta realised that portraying the zeal and passion of the police in providing closure to a nation would be best portrayed in the form of a series. "The making of Delhi Crime has been a personally transformative journey; speaking to every individual involved, retracing the paths that the police took during the course of the investigation, and hearing of the determination that it took for the case to be closed, despite severe limitations. I hope that we’ve been able to provide context, catharsis and open once again a difficult conversation that must be had about the forces that enabled this brutality,"  he says.