Seema Biswas’ bold character in Idam bags award

Seema Biswas plays a feisty older woman in

Idam

(Abode) who is not cowed down by her two sons who want to put her in an old-age home. The role won the best actress award at the Ottawa India Film Festival in Canada in June.
Director Jaya Jose Raj says he picked Seems Biswas for the role because the character, while that of a 70-year-old, is still a bold character. When the sons feel the answer to her living alone is to put her in an old-age home, she retorts with a ‘shocking’ idea. She says she will marry again to continue living in the ancestral house.

The film, shot in Thiruvananthapuram, had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in May and is set to be screened at the New Jersey Film Festival in September, after which the filmmakers will look at a theatrical release in Kerala.

“I was moved by my own mother’s adamant decision to stay on in the ancestral home even though my brother and I had moved away to pursue our careers. I wanted to appraise the situation of the old who might be facing the same dilemma at the fag end of their lives and put a mirror to their agony,” says Jaya Jose, whose documentary Kumudini: A Water Lily Chronicle was about the court battle that a 88-year-old waged and won in Alappuzha against a coir company for releasing effluents in the backwaters.