March 23, 1998

The fifth Mumbai International Film Festival was witness to an upsurge of female talent and expression.

By Anupama Chopra

It's so liberating to be on the fringes," director Sehjo Singh is saying. "You reduce the mainstream to the side stream. There is no money so there are no rules." It's the voice of documentary cinema in the '90s -- tough talking, surprisingly young, fiercely competitive and, astoundingly enough, female.

At the recently concluded fifth Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) for documentary, short and animation films, of the 150 films shown, a record 29 entries were made by women directors. The burgeoning video section had 32 female-authored films out of the 132 shown. At the first festival in 1990, less than 10 films came from women directors and most of these were by foreign directors. MIFF Director Bankim ensured the presence of women on the video jury: "Since so many entries were by women, we wanted women to evaluate them." Appropriately, MIFF opened with Nirankush, a sometimes stagey but ultimately effective hour-long fiction film on female infanticide in Rajasthan. It was the celluloid debut of a reed-thin, deceptively frail 25-year-old Jamia Millia graduate Venu Arora. One of the more popular retrospectives was a homage to filmmaker Kathleen Shannon, the founder of the renowned Studio D of the National Film Board of Canada, who died earlier this year. And at the closing ceremony, head of the main film jury P.K. Nair noted the phenomenon of increasing female participation in the documentary field.

"It's growing day by day," says Somendra Batra, general secretary of the Indian Documentary Producers' Association (IDPA). "In the past two years itself, some 50 to 60 women have joined us." Not surprisingly then, in Mumbai's Nehru Centre, where MIFF was held, women directors matched filmmaking, marketing and networking skills with their male colleagues. While mainstream cinema remains an old boys' club -- of the 200-odd films under production in Bollywood, less than five have women directors -- and non-mainstream bandies a token female membership, the non-feature seems to have become the medium for female expression. Says Singh, whose film Kol Tales picked up a jury award: "We've been shut out for too long."

MIFF rocked with the female voice. With stories of marginalised people, tales of struggles and suffering, dreams and aspirations, portraits of people who very rarely see their reflections on celluloid. So Kol Tales is the lyrically disturbing portrait of the bonded Kol tribe, while Ananya Chatterjee's The School That Karmi Soren Built documents the struggle of a school in a West Bengal village that was opened by a young Santhal woman and which remained unrecognised by the government even after 26 years. Aruna Har Prasad's charming The Dishum Dishum Man is a witty profile of Mahendra Verma, the Bollywood stunt director, and Sameera Jain's Portraits of Belonging -- Bhai Mian, a graceful salute to a kite maker living in Delhi.

But most women directors grappled with the theme closest to their heart -- women. Films on women's issues ranged from Shabnam Sukhdev's quietly poignant Alka -- Child to Bride/Wife, the story of a 20-year-old cancer survivor whose physical growth was stunted at 12, to Saba Dewan's moving Barf about a group of adolescent working-class Delhi girls who go for a trek to the Garhwal hills, to Vasudha Joshi's beautifully rendered For Maya, which explored the lives of three generations of women. "These films put a human face to the women's movement," says jury member Ruchira Gupta, who earlier directed the Emmy Award winning, The Selling of Innocents.

They also, as Chatterjee points out, offer a different perspective. "When a man thinks of history, he thinks of war and dynasties," she says. "When a woman thinks of history she thinks of empty ruined villages, the son who never returned home. Women are more sensitive." But women directors protest strongly against this "woman's film" ghettoisation. Says award-winning director Madhusree Datta: "Male filmmakers have always made films about men but nobody comments on that. But when I make a film on a girl growing up, it becomes a 'woman's film'. Obviously I will make a film about what I know best."

Why this upsurge of women directors? Video is the great equaliser. Once considered below their dignity by serious filmmakers, video gained ground in the '80s and has made dramatic strides in the '90s. At approximately Rs 2,500 a beta tape as opposed to Rs 16,000 for 1,000 feet of 35 mm film, video is increasingly becoming the medium of choice for young filmmakers. Also, training institutes like Jamia Millia in Delhi and the Xavier's Institute of Communications in Mumbai are churning out trained graduates, many of them women. Says Bankim: "Institutes are training many women and there is also a spillover from the ad world. Film is resource-oriented but in video, women participation has increased dramatically."

Quantity, however, does not translate into quality. The informal nature of video also makes it easy to abuse. Says Singh: "Camera chalta hai to lagta hai ki sab kuch picture hai (When the camera is on, everything looks like a picture). But we all learn the hard way."

Sometimes activist anger and good intentions make for pedantic celluloid. Critic Maithli Rao observes that women filmmakers inevitably treat the documentary as "a tool of empowerment rather than a means of creative and artistic self-expression". Adds IDPA's Batra, "Often, it is not a mature work, both in craft and content." Retorts Datta, "Gender or class doesn't make anybody a more articulate filmmaker. Women make as many lousy films as men. But not more."

The documentary may have embraced women directors but problems persist. Gupta says that a woman's work is "constantly trivialised". Unlike mainstream, where often studios don't even offer clean toilet facilities for women, a conscious gender bias hardly surfaces in the documentary set-up -- "If you choose to work in the non-feature, you are opting out of the mainstream and are by nature progressive," says Gupta. But women directors often find themselves struggling against stereotypes in their areas of work -- in rural areas, among officials. But many are learning to turn being a woman into an advantage. Arora, who works with filmmaker husband N. Rammakrishnan, says in many areas she is the front man. "If you are a woman, at least they listen."

Singh, meanwhile, is grappling with a slightly trickier problem. "My four-year-old daughter often asks me," she says laughing, 'Mummy, aap kale logon ki film kyun banati hon? Aap gore logon ki film banao. Aur paisa milega (Why do you make films about dark people? Make films about fair people. You will get more money')."

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