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August 2, 1999 |
INDIA TODAY | DAILY NEWS | ASTROLOGY | HOME |
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 Femme Fare Female gaze, midway cinema, stereotypes. The new idiom for Indian women filmmakers in India seems to be jargon. At least, that's one of the things that emerged from a screening last week of a docudrama on eight of the country's leading filmmakers called The Way I See It. Made over six months by Sangeeta Datta, a University of Sussex student, it has on-camera conversations with Sai Paranjpye, Deepa Mehta, Aparna Sen, Suma Josson, Kalpana Lajmi, Aruna Raje and Vijaya Mehta to establish how women have finally -- and definitively -- stormed a male bastion. Not everyone who watched the film fell in with the school
of thought. In the panel discussion that followed, the debate, of course, was on
bracketing. "Why should they be called women directors?" Mrinal Sen asked.
"A filmmaker is a filmmaker, why does gender matter?" Makes sense. But, says
Datta, "These women have struggled to come to positions of power from relative
invisibility in the last 20 years." Makes sense too. --Labonita Ghosh |
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