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In a country where the closest we get to political filmmaking is, say, a love story set in the backdrop of communal violence, or a love story set in the backdrop of militancy in Kashmir, or well, a love story set in the backdrop of (fill in preferred social/political issue), the fiery, irrepressible Leena Manimekalai is an aberration. That the 33-year-old, though feted abroad, is a marginal figure in her own country, and is struggling to pay her cast and crew, is a testament to her own uncompromising vision of filmmaking as a political act. And it helps that she is never afraid to pay the price for her politics. “I know the importance of being hated,” she says.
shooting for justice
Cut to 2002. Manimekalai lands up in Mangattucheri village near Arokonam. With a hired vehicle, camera equipment, and the Rs 1 lakh she had saved up, she set out to make a film on the Arundhatiyar community’s practice of ‘dedicating’ girls to the deity Mathamma. This was a practice akin to the devadasi system, where minor girls were given over to the temple, and exploited by the priests and the community. Manimekalai documented cases of children who had been sexually exploited for ten or twenty rupees.
“I didn’t think I was going to make a film. I shot as much as I could in a day,” she says. When she went back to Chennai, she freelanced to pay the bills. Her friends helped out with the editing and sound-mixing. The 16-minute documentary, Mathamma incensed the Arundhatiyar community. She was vilified. Her own family was outraged. But the National Human Rights Commission took notice of the film, and marked it as evidence to crack down on the inhuman practice. Police action followed.
2004: Manimekalai goes to Tamil Nadu’s Siruthondamadevi village, to make a film on violence against Dalit women in Tamil Nadu. Parai, her 45-minute documentary draws the wrath of local politicians, upper caste communities, and even sections of Dalits, who attacked her higher caste status and accused her of painting them black. But the district collector intervened. “Seventeen caste Hindus who had violated and raped Dalit women were arrested.” Parai had served its purpose.
“Together, these two films triggered a successful video participatory movement that brought about government intervention, securing protection for women who were harassed in the name of caste,” says Manimekalai.
Her latest, and most controversial, film is Sengadal (The Dead Sea), a 102-minute “factual fiction feature” about the fishermen in Dhanushkodi, a tiny village that is the closest Indian point from Sri Lanka.
During the LTTE conflict in Lanka, Indian fishermen who went out to the sea were attacked by the Lankan troops, accused as rebels, spies or smugglers, and shot or maimed. Sengadal captures the plight of these poor fishermen, both Lankan and Indian, who struggle to survive here.
The film was hard-hitting and yet sensitive. Manimekalai developed her storyline and screenplay from the stories she gathered from the local community. She got fisher folk and refugees themselves to act in the film. But once it was ready, the censor board clamped down on it for its “denigrating remarks against the Indian government”, and because “it would affect the relations between India and Lanka. “
After a censorship battle fought over many months, Sengadal was finally released a few months ago with an A certificate. It won critical acclaim at many international film festivals, and last month, bagged the NAWFF (Network of Asian Women’s Award Film Festival) award in Tokyo as the best Asian Woman film of 2011. “Navi Pillai, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who saw the film at the Durban International Film Festival, has taken it as a witness of the human rights violations committed by the Sri Lankan Navy on the Indian Fishermen,” says Manimekalai.
Sengadal was not an aesthetic achievement, said film critics. But to Manimekalai, the subject was more important. “I know that Sengadal is far from being a cinematic accomplishment. The experiment was to work against my artistic ambitions, and focus on the issue.”
Filmmaking, forManimekalai, is necessarily ‘interventionist’. “My films are three-dimensional.One, I showcase issues. Two, the local community tell their stories and participate in the making of the film. Three, once the film is made, I take it to the audience and initiate a dialogue with them,” says Manimekalai. In India, “I’ve taken my films to over 400 villages. That is important to me.”
ordinary village girl
Manimekalai hails from Maharajapuram, a remote village south of Madurai, a place where literacy was not common and dogmas were rarely breached. Her father was a college lecturer.
When Manimekalai went from being an ordinary village girl to a brilliant student in school and college, things took an unusual turn. She came from a farming family, and village custom dictated that girls marry their maternal uncle a few years after reaching puberty. “It was to escape that fate that I became a university rank-holder, not because I found studies interesting,” she says.
But good grades weren’t enough. She learnt that her family was making arrangements for her marriage with her uncle, who was a lawyer and an MP. She was 18 then, and in her second year at an engineering college in Madurai. “I’ve always been a rebel. Like my father and grandparents, I was also politically and socially active. I ran away to Chennai.” She walked into the offices of Vikatan, a popular Tamil magazine, hoping they would give her a job.
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