Manisha Sobhrajani
New Delhi
SHOWING off the elaborate work on ‘her’ saree and ‘her’ many bangles,
eunuch Laxminarayan, who was born in a Hindu Brahmin family, said: “My
name is Laxmi, and that is sufficient by way of introduction”.
Gender barriers were transgressed with ease and flamboyance during a fourday
international documentary film festival in New Delhi. Titled ‘Identities
and Spaces’ the festival brought together a range of films that explored gender
and sexuality in everyday lives.
The festival was organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) in
association with the Prasaar
Bharati Corporation, the
MacArthur Foundation, UNESCO
and India Habitat Centre (IHC). It
was held from May 12-15, at the
Habitat Centre’s Stein auditorium.
While some of the films premiered
at this festival, there were
others which had been shown at
international film festivals held
in Sundance, Chicago, Berlin,
Toronto, Outfest, etc. The entries
came from all over the world
including Pakistan, Israel,
Zimbabwe, Turkey and New
Zealand.
Inaugurating the festival,
Planning Commission member Dr
Sayeeda Hameed said: “I belong to
that generation of people for
whom Ismat Chughtai and Sadat
Hasan Manto defined the concepts
of gender and sexuality. Through the films shown during this festival, I hope to
be able to come to terms with a lot of questions I have about my own self.”
The opening film, A Body That Will Speak, was film-aker Sukanya Sen’s
personal journey about being comfortable with her own body: an honest
account of the many paths she traversed to feel good and confident about the
way she was.
The second entry, About the Body, was from Israel. It was a touching account
of the lives of four young women who were injured in terrorist attacks. The
camera followed them for three months in a unique body workshop by dancer
Ohad Naharin, and captured how the women were compelled to confront a
new perception of their own selves and their femininity.Another film, Who Can Speak of Men? was a surprisingly intimate account of
middle-class Muslim women living in the Zakir Nagar area of New Delhi, who
openly refuse to conform to feminine norms.
The film takes us through the routines of their everyday lives and is an honest account of their daily struggles to be true to themselves and their sexual orientation. During a panel discussion after the screening of this film, film-maker Ambarien Al Qadar, who belongs to the same area as the women she documents in her film, said: “The idea was to understand gender identities away from biological identities.” Qadar also spoke to the families of two of the women in her film. Being Male Being Koti, a film shot in Kolkata, explored the painful experience of growing up gender variant and not being able to understand, let alone explain, the difference. The film was able to portray the trauma of living in a world where ‘there is no one quite like me’. Anindya Hazra, one of the kotis documented in the film said it was difficult to say whether “we challenge stereotyping or reinforce it?” Activist Jaya Sharma, reinforcing Hazra’s opinion, said: “As a society, we have totally failed to address the issues of ‘not being a boyish enough boy’ or ‘not being a girlish enough girl’.” Film-maker Kirsty MacDonald, whose film Black And White, an entry from New Zealand, deals with the issue of hermaphrodites, said: “You have to collaborate with the subjects of the film rather than treat them as someone whose mysteries you have to unravel to the world and you sit away and make those observations.” While the first day of the fourday event dealt with issues that go beyond the neat boxes of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, koti, and homosexual, day two looked at gruesome hate crimes against women.
The first film screened on the second day was, The Man Who Stole My Mother’s Face. It showed the deeply traumatic journey undertaken by the daughter of a woman who was raped. Although the attacker was identified, he was never charged. Filmmaker Cathy Henkel took matters in her own hands and confronted her mother’s attacker. Every 29 seconds a woman is raped in South Africa. Rape For Who I Am offered a moving insight into the lives of South African black lesbians who are raped because of their non-conformity to the gender they are born in. The women refuse to become victims and that makes life harder for them. In a panel discussion ‘Healing from Abuse’, film-aker Priya Krishnaswamy said: “We have the notion that home is the safest place but that is not true at all.” She said that child sexual abuse was present in far deeper segments of society than we were willing to accept. Counsellor Seema Prakash, who works with victims of sexual abuse and who herself was a victim as a child, talked about dealing with other people’s traumas in a profession like hers. She said: “You leave your own baggage behind when you come into a counseling session.” Day three saw an amazing entry from Pakistan. Parlour defined four faces, four masks and four short sketches of lives, loves and desires traced through visits to a beauty parlour.
Film-maker Mehreen Jabbar explored themes of a ‘different kind’ in this documentary: themes that could not be expressed on mainstream television in Pakistan till some time ago. Two films, Bumbaiyaa and Between The Lines: India’s Third Gender, successfully attempted to follow and document lives of the hijra community in Mumbai. While the first film strives to gauge the sexual attitudes of the people and the relationship that Mumbai has with sex, in the second film, photographer Anita Khemka vividly captures and portrays the hidden hijra sub-culture, fascinating the audience with their ornate femininity and captivating the spiritual powers of the eunuchs. She openly discusses many intimate details of their lives such as their castration ceremonies, thoughts about sexuality, and overcoming economic dependence on begging and prostitution. Khemka deserves applause for being able to capture the real lives of hijras on reel. Both films showcase the life of Laxmi, who is now the president of an NGO, and has clearly emerged a winner in her battle to fight her natural gender identity and come to terms with her sexual orientation.
Another interesting film screened during the third day was Laying Janaki To Rest. The film explored the symbolic relationship of Sita with the image of women in India. The final day began with the screening of Mirror Mirror On The Wall: Who Am I After All? The film traced the engagement of students of an all girls’ school with their dilemmas about sexuality, along with their parents and teachers. The subject as beautifully shot and produced by film-makers Naina Kapur and Smita Bharti. Two films which were shot in the backdrop of the Maharashtra government’s controversial move to ban girls from dancing in beer bars in Mumbai – Delhi- Mumbai-Delhi and Fight To Dance - were also screened at the festival. Another interesting film – Morality TV And Loving Jihad – looked outside the frames that weave the frenetic tapestry of ‘Breaking News’ on India’s many 24x7 news channels.
Tied Hands, an entry from Israel, deserves special mention, as it was a sensitive and complex narration of the relationship between a mother and her ailing son. The mother desperately looks for some marijuana to ease her son’s pain. During this search, she uncovers some disturbing truths of her past life, facts she had been avoiding all along. Naheed’s Story, another interesting entry from Pakistan, documented by Beena Sarwar, records the struggle of Pakistan’s finest kathak dancer to dance in Pakistan. The artiste is banned from national television and forced to leave Pakistan after General Zia-ul-Haq’s coup of 1979. Naheed later returns home and is awarded for her art. Directors Manak Matiyani and Kuber Sharma present portraits of their own mothers in All About Our Mothers. The film explores gender positions in their own families and looks at their family histories in the backdrop of larger developments in the women’s movement. The film was applauded by the audience as there were resonances for every one. The fact is, as the film says, it is almost always women who care for the children and family most often at the cost of their professional lives. The two mothers honestly admit that their respective men have not been as involved with their families as they would have liked them to be.
Another film on mothers, Goodbye Mother, saw film-maker Joydeep Ghosh trace the changing patterns of motherhood through technology, gender power, psycho-social issues and the conflict between selfhood and motherhood. The film also questions a mother’s ‘unconditional’ love for her child. Speaking at a panel discussion on ‘Subverting Boundaries’, feminist Urvashi Butalia said: “Motherhood is a ‘gendered’ role. Hence it is never free of a context. Motherhood sometimes becomes the only identity women have, and they have to struggle really hard to get any other kind of identity.” She questioned the notion of choice: most women did not have the freedom to do what they long to do. The festival also saw an art installation ‘We Never Ask for It’, in partnership with the Blank Noise Project. Blank Noise is a public, participatory art project which seeks to challenge public spaces where women are subjected to sexual harassment. Through street interventions, Blank Noise proposes to build public dialogue around men and women and their relationship to their city. This rich power-packed festival is over, but documentaries are available with Syncline Filmstore which is the sole distributor for all PSBT documentaries.
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