The Hindu : New Delhi News : Diverse lives, similar woes....

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Oct 23, 2007
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New Delhi

New Delhi

Diverse lives, similar woes....

Parul Sharma

Film festival on women opens at Jamia Millia Islamia today

NEW DELHI: Bringing together lives of women from different backdrops and countries and narrating tales of their ordeals is a film festival on women that opens at Jamia Millia Islamia here on Tuesday.

Titled “Lives of Women”, the three-day festival is being organised by the Jamia Cultural Committee and the Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies at Ansari Auditorium on the campus. The festival will showcase films from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Palestine.

Critically acclaimed films such as renowned director Girish Kasaravalli’s Kannada film “Thaayi Saheba”, Aparna Sen’s “Parmitar Ek Din” and independent Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar’s “Khamosh Pani” will be screened.

One of the movies to be screened during the festival is on the life of domestic help Baby Haldar, who was inspired to write the story of her life by her employer. Abandoned by her mother at four, married off at 12 to an abusive husband, a mother at 13, there was little in Baby’s traumatic childhood to suggest that she would become an emerging star on India’s literary horizon.

There are films set against backgrounds of political upheaval in their countries and how the protagonists deal with them. Bangladeshi film “A Certain Liberation” captures the life of Gurudasi Mondal who went insane after watching her entire family being killed in 1971 during the Liberation War of Bangladesh and continues to wander in the streets of Kopilmoni, a small town, in quest of all that she had lost.

Similarly “Khamosh Pani” talks about a widowed mother and her young son set in the late 1970s in a village in Pakistan which is coming under radical influence.

“Waiting….” tells a story of missing people -- boys and men -- who were picked up by security forces and then simply disappeared. Since the men are not declared “dead”, their wives are not widows but “half widows”, who now have to take up the role of a bread-earner for the family.

Director R. P. Amudhan’s Tamil film “Shit” raises critical questions about the working conditions of the sanitary workers and the indifference of the municipal corporation and the lack of civic sense among people in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, through the eyes of one such worker, Mariammal.

Other films that will be screened are “Buru Garra”, “Are They Potted Plants?”, “Arna’s Children”, “A Body that will speak” and “Mother Courageous”. All the films will have English subtitles.

The festival will be inaugurated by Jamia Vice-Chancellor Mushirul Hasan on Tuesday.

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