Toxic male aggression is responsible for coercing sexual favours out of women in Kerala film industry, writes a woman filmmaker. Change won’t happen unless the predators are punished
The 1929 kino-eye classic Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov was a complex experiment bringing into focus the grammar of cinematic means. It also showed the cameraman as a heroic figure striding into a new medium and participating in creating a new world. Such was the hope and joy it encompassed.
Born and brought up in Kerala, I was not encouraged by any person or institution to make films. Still, Vertov inspired me. Woman with a Video Camera (2004) is my attempt to take Vertov’s filmic experiment a step further. In 75 years, cinema had become a powerful industry. I knew as a film critic that the movie camera is not an innocent recorder, and as a woman that the movie camera is not even an innocent constructor of reality but part of a highly capitalistic, patriarchal and hierarchical film industry.
Born and brought up in Kerala, I was not encouraged by any person or institution to make films. Still, Vertov inspired me. Woman with a Video Camera (2004) is my attempt to take Vertov’s filmic experiment a step further. In 75 years, cinema had become a powerful industry. I knew as a film critic that the movie camera is not an innocent recorder, and as a woman that the movie camera is not even an innocent constructor of reality but part of a highly capitalistic, patriarchal and hierarchical film industry.