DVCAM, 55 Mins, Tamil with English Subtitles, 2005

CENTRE FOR MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES
Tata Institute of Social Sciences

SheWrite

DVCAM, 55 mins, Tamil with English subtitles, 2005

SheWrite weaves together the narratives and work of four Tamil women poets. Salma negotiates subversive expression within the tightly circumscribed space allotted to a woman in the small town of Thuvarankurichi. She is able to defy and transcend family proscriptions on writing to become a significant voice questioning patriarchal mores in a powerful yet gentle way. For Kuttirevathi, a Siddha doctor and researcher based in Chennai, solitude is a crucial creative space from where her work resonates, speaking not just for herself but also for other women who are struggling to find a voice. Her anthology entitled Breasts (2003) became a controversial work that elicited hate mail, obscene calls and threats. The fact that a number of women poets are resisting patriarchy and exploring themes such as desire and sexuality in their creative work been virulently opposed by some Tamil film lyricists, who have gone on record with threats of death and violence. This has been resisted by a group of poets and other artists who have formed a collective called Anangu (Woman), which is attempting to expand the subversive creative spaces available to women writers and poets, across Tamil Nadu. Malathy Maitri, who lives in Pondicherry, is a social activist. She is a founder member of Anangu. Her poems attempt to explore and express feminine power and spaces. Sukirtharani, a school teacher in Lalapet, writes of desire and longing, celebrating the body in a way that affirms feminine empowerment and a rejection of male-centred discourse. The film traverses these diverse modes of resistance, through images and sounds that evoke the universal experiences of pain, anger, desire and transcendence.

On the Making of the Film

The film has been made as a collaborative project with the poets, giving each one the space to present themselves and their work. It has been made on a shoestring budget. The directors have researched, scripted, shot and edited the film, done production management, graphics and special effects as well as the sound mixing and subtitles. It has been a mutually enriching experience, for the protagonists and the directors. The protagonists regard the film as a useful device in their struggle to open up spaces for creative feminine discourse in Tamil Nadu. The directors have attempted to explore the very different, yet similar ways in which the protagonists challenge the dominant discourse, through the use of image and sound, in non-indexical, sometimes playful modes that offer the viewers spaces for their own interpretations. A Tamil version of the film is also being made.

Awards

§  Best documentary Prize, IV Festival Internacional del Documental Tres Continentes (IV Three Continents International Documentary Festival, Venezuela 2005

§  Indian Documentary Producers Association Awards 2005: The First Technical Award for Sound Design and the Second Technical Award for Cinematography

Festival Selection:

§  12th Festival Internazionale Cinema Delle Donne (12th International Women’s Film Festival), Turin, 2005

§  Film South Asia, Kathmandu 2005

§  Kara Film festival 2005, Karachi

§  Platforma 2005, Athens

§  Madurai Film Festival 2005, Madurai, India

§  Ethnographic Film Festival of Montreal, Canada

§  Vibgyor Film Festival, Trichur, Kerala

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jan 01, 2006
Literary Review
CINEMA
The filming of poetry
S. THEODORE BASKARAN
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2006/01/01/stories/2006010100080200.htm
This is a recommended viewing for all those who aspire to make films on writers and is a good introduction to the contemporary Tamil literary scene.

Moving image: Malati Maitreyi playing pallanguzhi with her daughter Tabitha.
SheWrite, colour, 55 minutes, Tamil/ English. Direction: Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayashankar. Music: L.Vaidyanathan. Camera: K.P. Jayashankar. Sound: Elangovan.
HOW do you film poetry? What kind of screen visuals can support the lines of a poem?
How do you marry the medium of print and film? Two Mumbai-based filmmakers have taken on this challenge and have successfully demonstrated how it can be done. Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayashankar have made a short film titled "SheWrite", on four young Tamil poets, all women.
Women poets have been part of Tamil literary history from the earliest times. Kakaipadini lived and wrote during the Sangam age and her works form part of Akananooru anthology. The much-quoted Avvaiyar's poems are also there. The subject of this film, the four poets, Salma, Kutti Revathi, Sugirdharani and Malati Maitri, have been writing for the past five years and have been published in Tamil literary magazines such as Kalachuvadu, Uyirmai and Puthiya Parvai. Winning critical acclaim, they have been translated widely.
Women and words
When Kutti Revathi, the youngest of them all, brought out her second collection of poems in 2001, she titled it Mulaigal (Breasts). This provoked anger and criticism from some male poets. Obscene calls and threats were directed against the poet. Meanwhile more women poets began writing about the female body. One enraged senior male poet said that if he comes across any one of them, he would slap her. In a TV interview, a writer of film songs said that these writers should be burnt alive. The women point out that when men write bawdy songs or erotic poetry there is no protest. But if a woman writes such lines there is outrage against them. One of the four poets points to the works of the medieval poet Andal and says that erotic poetry is not new to Tamil. I recall that when Ambai (C.S. Lakshmi) started publishing her short stories in the 1970s, she was subjected to similar mean sniping. Now the poets have formed a forum called Anangu (Woman) to meet patriarchal opposition to their works. One of the poets sued the songwriter and extracted an apology. A report of this controversy appeared in a weekly tabloid and it attracted the attention of the two filmmakers. They packed their gear, caught the next flight and made the film in just 10 days.
The film is neatly structured into four parts, one for each poet. Through interviews, images, off-screen voices and titles cards, the filmmakers make their point powerfully. With a hand-held camera and available light, they create a world of cinema verite in which the lines of the poets come alive. Images of teashop, flower vendors, temples, panwallas, rain-drenched streets and rice fields capture the ambience of Tamil Nadu effectively. Some of the visuals created by the filmmakers, such as the three red capsicums, merge imperceptibly with the lines of the poems. The poets are shown in their own surroundings, Salma in a village near Tiruchi, Sugirdharani in Ranipet, Kutti Revathi in Chennai and Malati Maitreyi in Pondicherry. One of the most endearing images of the film is Malati Maitreyi playing pallanguzhi with her daughter Tabitha. A very fine balance is maintained between the images and the lines of the poem recited by the off-screen voice. An additional dimension of the poets that adds to the film is that Salma, the village panchayat president, is a Muslim and Sugirdharani, the school teacher is a dalit. They both discuss these identities on the screen.
The soundscape of the film is another strong point. Music by L.Vaidyanathan comes in unobtrusively and enhances the quality of the images. Care has been taken by him that the bars of his music do not overwhelm the visuals. Other sounds have been imaginatively incorporated to enliven the scenes, such as the muezzin's call from the mosque. Preetham Chakaravarthy reads the poems with empathy.
When I screened this film for a group of university students in a Southern university in the United States recently, the reaction was electric. The sequence that follows Salma's talk about her marriage — two puppets, a male and a female, swirling in the washing machine — attracted notice. This and the conversation between Sugirdharani and her mother on marriage, drew a lot of questions.
This is a recommended viewing for all those who aspire to make films on writers and is a good introduction to the contemporary Tamil literary scene. Here is the poem of Kutti Revathi that started the controversy.
Breasts
Breasts are bubbles, rising
In wet marshlands
I wondrously watched — and guarded —
Their gradual swell and blooming
At the edges of my youth's season
Saying nothing to anyone else,
They sing along
With me alone, always:
Of Love,
Rapture,
Heartbreak
To the nurseries of my turning seasons,
They never once failed or forgot
To bring arousal
During penance, they swell, as if straining
To break free; and in the fierce tug of lust,
They soar, recalling the ecstasy of music
From the crush of embrace, they distil
The essence of love; and in the shock
Of childbirth, milk from coursing blood
Like two teardrops from an unfulfilled love
That cannot ever be wiped away,
They well up, as if in grief, and spill over.
(Translated by N.Kalyan Raman)
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2006/01/01/stories/2006010100080200.htm

InfoChange News & Features, August 2005

SheWrite (Tamil, with English subtitles) 55 mins, 2005

http://www.infochangeindia.org/documentary44.jsp

This is a film that speaks richly and in many layers, both in its words and in its images about poetry, about space and about freedom of expression. Following a 2003 story in Tehelka that talked about women poets in Tamil Nadu being vilified by males because they wrote “obscenely”, the film makers track down the group called Anangu (“woman”) and speak to its members, some of whom have been criticized with such violence by fellow writers and critics. The violence of the critique must be mentioned: Palani Bharati and Snehan, themselves writers of lyrics for film and television, asked that these women be burned and a certain Abdul Rehman asked readers to slap them if they met them. Their crime: writing about their bodies, about their emotions and about sex and sexuality without shame and without euphemism.

The four poets that the film focuses on are all young women, Salma, Kuttirevathi, Malathy Maitri and Sukirtharani. One is married, with children, one has a daughter, the other two are apparently single, but all of them speak about the space that writing affords them as women. Each of them also speaks of the freedoms of girlhood that are snatched away as we get to be teenagers. Salma says that while we can accept these restrictions in our lives, we cannot in our writing, for “writing has many more spaces”.

The poetry these women write is not comfortable or easy to digest. There is anger and bitterness, even as they claim the inner and outer spaces of their bodies for themselves. But what is far more astounding than the strength and ease of their poetic voices is what they say to the camera. Clearly and without a flicker of hesitation, they speak of their experience and expression as having been dominated by patriarchy and male-centred language. They are also sure that what they articulate in their poems, even though it arises from their own lives, speaks not simply to, but for other women. As Kuttirevathi says, “I write the voices of other women…(the poetry) belongs to all women who have not written.”

These are not women who grew up in urban centres, exposed to various politicised and articulated feminisms and self-conscious women’s writing, or to growing feminist (or simply female) solidarity. Their words speak with absolute integrity and one cannot doubt the universality of women’s experience and the way it colours our expressions of how and where we are located in the world around us. Eve Ensler, the self-celebrating author of The Vagina Monologues, would find her material completely up-staged here. The writers that form Anangu go well beyond the specificity of their body parts to mirror and reflect upon a woman’s experience more holistically and with far greater depth than the borrowed voices that Ensler showcases.

As much as SheWrite focuses on the poetry of the four women, we also see them in the wholeness of their lives: arguing with their mothers about marriage, cooking for their families, playing with their children and chatting with friends and, in Salma’s case, running the local panchayat. The film reminds us that as much as they are poets, they are women, with multiple social relationships that create multiple, simultaneous identities.

Monteiro and Jayasankar have extended themselves in this film, working away from an obvious correspondence between word and image and then, breaking down the materiality of the image itself. These are new and exciting areas in “documentary”, where filmmakers attempt to resolve issues of form and content in increasingly defiant and interesting ways. SheWrite is an excellent contribution to the growing documentation of women’s experiences and also to expanding the boundaries of non-fiction film.

For more information, contact: Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai 400 088. Phone: 022 25563290

URL: www.tiss.edu/cmcs

Review

TimeOut Mumbai, July 1-14, 2005, page 52

Dual Purpose

Nandini Ramnath meets Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar, who’ve made a new docu, SheWrite.

Even in the worst weather conditions, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences campus, with its thick trees, rolling corridors and staff rooms with French windows, looks very inviting. In the monsoon, TISS Deonar looks like an enchanted forest, and maybe it’s the romance in the raindrops that makes filmmaker Anjali Monteiro suggest that we photograph her and her working partner and husband, K. P. Jayasankar, under an umbrella.

Just what we’d wanted, but were too deferential to ask. Monteiro and Jayasankar teach media and communication at TISS and have been making documentaries together for 19 years. They married in 1989 and have made over 25 films. Neither of them has made a film individually. They’ve won praise and a truckful of awards for films like Identity – The Construction of Selfhood and Kahankar:Ahankar. Their absorbing new film, SheWrite, premieres at the Vikalp Film Club.