‘Women should take every single power they have to tell their stories’

Our Reporter
Dimapur, March 20 (EMN): The Indian film industry needs to show people of different milieu and cultures authentically, while women should take ‘every single power they have’ to tell their stories, according to Anjali Menon, who is a producer, director, and writer.

‘There is so much that we adopt, and we adapt to what is expected of us and when allowed, we flow free,’ she added.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the Network of Women in Media India (NWMI), a panel discussion was held featuring a range of women working in the Indian film industry where questions on the topic “Half the picture: why women need to tell the stories and be in them” were addressed.

The panel discussion, dubbed as ‘pioneering collective,’ was held in collaboration with Women and Cinema Collective (WCC) via Zoom on March 19.

Addressing the NWMI discussion, panelist Anjali Menon remarked that by making films that are women-centric, she has tried to portray a world that is more gender-balanced.

“It’s not just the male gaze. Wanting to gender-balance the narrative will slowly shift that gaze. And in my limited work, I have tried gender-balanced characters who are infallible, heroes, all of it” she said.

Another panelist Deepti Gupta, director and cinematographer, said that ‘very often strange things happen in the industry of having to keep your politics to yourself to be in the profession’.

“I discovered that the language of the lens was a very male language. To me, my gender is not defined as a cinematographer. Does it have to come through in everything I do? Probably not, but to people who saw me, that’s the first thing I saw”, Gupta  asserted while  recalling that it took her years of shooting films and percolating through one’s own politics and vision to pick a story and find one’s own politics in it.

Jenny Dolly, who is an Assistant Director, recounted that there were days when she thought of quitting cinema because of the struggle she had to go through to do good work.

What sustained her was how phenomenal the medium was, she said.

‘It is a whole new world and no one should be denied the opportunity to get into a world to tell their stories,’ she said.

Kutti Revathi, a poet, lyricist, screenwriter and director, opined the world needs more of women’s stories because women are ‘vibrant, they carry fundamental human learning and they bring life into the world’.

“We don’t have the time to blame anyone, we haven’t done it. We must tell our stories to break the destructive patriarchal pattern. For feminisation of culture to happen, women’s voices and values matter, their stories matter the most,” she asserted while also pointing out that “the rationalisation is also trying to justify frameworks of patriarchal mindset and social setup and that’s how men are convinced of normalising war, violence, oppression”.

“I think women’s storytelling is a healing process. It is a process of reconstitution”, she asserted.

Actor/Producer Rima Kallingal also observed that the ‘time of women’ is here because women’s stories, emotions, and perspectives ‘finally matter’.

“Our stories and what we have to show the world finally has some meaning in a capitalistic society. Yet, even now, a lot of female directors have to find a male character to cast to show that the movie still has some value”, she lamented while adding that ‘we are still somewhere there’.

‘But it’s time we live in a culture where we might need to take all the help we have and go ahead and cast that guy, but tell your stories.

“Let your main cast have her story, and go ahead and do it. In the world we live in, getting the work done is important,” she conveyed.

Production designer and writer/director Shazia Iqbal recounted that “on set men would just not look at me or hear me, and would just look through me”.

“Till it reached a point I would let my work speak”, she added.