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Director: Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar
Producer: Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar
Camera: K.P. Jayasankar
Sound: Elangovan R.
Editing: Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar
Music: S.L. Vaidyanathan
Script: Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar
Special Effects: K.P. Jayasankar
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Duration: 55 Mins
Format: DVCam
Year of Production: 2005
Language: Tamil
Subtitle: English
Description:
SheWrite weaves together the narratives and work of four young Tamil
women poets: Salma, Kuttirevathi, Malathy and Sukirtharani
Synopsis:
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.
In various ways, the dominant culture has tried to threaten and rubbish
the poets and their work. This has been resisted by a group of poets
and other artists who have formed an organization 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, has been a Dalit and Marxist
activist. She is a founder member of Anangu and militantly opposes the
attacks on women writers. Her poems attempt to explore and express
feminine power. Sukirtharani, a schoolteacher 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, throughindia and sounds
that evoke the universal experiences of pain, anger, desire and
transcendence.
www.tiss.edu/umc
Festivals:
12° Festival Internazionale Cinema Delle Donne (12 th International
Women’s Film Festival), Turin, 2005
Film South Asia, Katmandu 2005
http://shewrite.tripod.com/index.htm
Posted By
KPJayasankar
on Monday, June 13, 2005
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 Back to List of Films
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Posted on 1/17/2006 by K.P. Jayasankar
Subject: The Hindu: Literary Review -The filming of poetry
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.
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,india, 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.india 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
endearingindia of the film is Malati Maitreyi playing pallanguzhi
with her daughter Tabitha. A very fine balance is maintained between
theindia 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)
Posted on 8/29/2005 by K.P. Jayasankar
Subject: Sunday Deccan Herald-Art and Culture
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Poetic licence or porn? Shewrite is a film about four women who refuse
to buckle down to societal pressures of propriety and write poetry that
is provocative and bold, says Mala Kumar. “If they don’t want you to
write, why do you want to write?” asks a mother of her unmarried
daughter, Sukirtharani, a schoolteacher in Lalapet who was hounded for
writing ‘obscene’ poetry. The young poet writes of desire and longing,
celebrating the body in a way that affirms feminine empowerment and a
rejection of male-centred discourse. “But do you think what I write is
vulgar?” persists Sukirtharani. The poems in Tamil are, in fact,
beautiful, brave and bereft of the motive to titillate. The poems and
their creators make up SheWrite, a documentary film in Tamil with
English subtitles, made by the award-winning duo Dr Anjali Monteiro and
Dr K P Jayashankar. They were in Bangalore recently at the screening of
the film that weaves together the narratives and work of Sukirtharani
and three other Tamil women poets. “We read about the attack on these
women by lyricists in Tamil Nadu and were keen to document the stand
taken by these women,” says Dr Anjali Monteiro, Professor and Head,
Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
(TISS), Mumbai. “As a group of over 250 documentary makers in the
country, we are fighting against thought control,” adds Dr K P
Jayashankar, Reader (Production), TISS. “Social documentaries face
several levels of censorship— first there is the thought-control from
institutions and society on what they think are appropriate topics to
be filmed. Then we have the marketing censorship— some films are
acceptable by theatre owners and some are not. Our films are therefore
screened at informal gatherings and through an informal network of
people who are interested in social issues,” says the filmmaker who has
an MA in German language and a PhD in Humanities and Social Sciences,
from IIT, Mumbai. SheWrite was screened to a small audience at the
Centre for Education and Documentation. The film starts with Salma, who
had to quit school when her family found out she and her friends had
sneaked in to see a movie, which they later found out was for adults.
“I loved to read, and all I wanted to do was to read and write,” says
Salma in the film. Salma negotiates subversive expression within the
tiny space allotted to a woman in the small town of Thuvarankurichi.
She has been able to defy and transcend family proscriptions on writing
to become a significant voice questioning patriarchal mores in a
powerful yet gentle way. When her anthology of poems was launched, she
had to feign sickness— a male cousin accompanied her and her mother to
the book launch instead of to the hospital. ‘Not just my poetry’ For
Kuttirevathi, a Siddha doctor and researcher based in Chennai, solitude
is a crucial creative space from where her work resonates. “I write
about my own feelings, but I also write about the feelings that other
women are unable to express. So, my poetry is not just mine but also of
other women,” says the young lady who took to Siddha because it
involved learning content in verse! Her anthology entitled Breasts
became a controversial work that elicited hate mail, obscene calls and
threats. “Why is it that the world only talks about sizes and shapes of
breasts as though they were something made of plastic? Why is it that
they are so rarely seen as the human part that nurtures life?”
questions the poet. The rubbishing of many women poets by film
lyricists led to the formation of ‘Anangu’, a group of poets and other
artists which is attempting to expand the subversive creative spaces
available to women writers and poets, across Tamil Nadu. Says Malathy
Maitri, a Pondicherry-based Dalit and Marxist activist and founder
member of Anangu, “We were upset that people who use double entendre
and bad language to attract people should call our poetry ‘vulgar’.”
Monteiro and Jayashankar worked on a very small budget in unknown
territory to document the lives of these four poets. “We allowed them
the freedom to tell us what we could and what we should not shoot,”
says Dr Monteiro. “We are not here as activists trying to set free the
‘victims’. And we do not believe we can change the world with our
documentaries, but we do believe that the strength and personalities of
these remarkable women needs to be documented,” adds Dr Jayashankar.
The couple, married now for 16 years, are both Howard Thomas Memorial
Fellows in Media Studies at Goldsmiths College, London and complement
each other. Jointly they have made 25 films, and won nine national and
international awards for their videos. “We want to show the
complexities around people and situations. Everything is not black or
white. In SheWrite, for instance, Salma’s husband is not a ‘bad’ man
just because he has not openly encouraged her writing. She is not a
‘rebellious working woman’ just because she is now the Panchayat
President. And the poets are not ’modern’ just because their writing is
bold. They continue to live conservative lives. “We did a film where we
showed prisoners writing poems. The dominant identity of a prisoner is
that he is ‘bad’ and therefore incapable of the finer arts like writing
poetry, but we found that so untrue,” reveals Dr Jayashankar, a poet
himself. Using straight documentation and cinematic techniques like
soft focus, Monteiro and Jayashankar have made a film that gives wing
to the poetry of the poets. Whether society gives them the right to
write or not, these women invite readers to take a glimpse of the world
that their mind sees. “Poetry burst out from me like a spark,” says
Sukirtharani in the film. And the sparks have flown to light many minds
across the country now, with SheWrite.
http://deccanherald.com/deccanherald/aug282005/finearts636212005827.asp
Posted on 8/23/2005 by K.P. Jayasankar
Subject: : InfoChange News & Features, August 2005
http://www.infochangeimages.org/documentary44.jsp
This is a film that speaks richly and in many layers, both in its words
and in itsindia 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: Unit for Media and Communication, Tata
Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai 400 088. Phone: 022 25563290
umctiss[AT]vsnl.com URL: www.tiss.edu/umc
Posted on 8/22/2005 by K.P. Jayasankar
Subject: The Hindu: http://www.hindu.com/fr/2005/08/19/stor
Our body, our space
BAGESHREE S.
SheWrite talks about four Tamil women writers who have dared to speak
out boldly and have fought for their right to do so
FIGHTING MINDSETS Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar's film is
inspired by women who refuse to be reined in
Can you name the one "object" that has been tirelessly described down
the ages in creative writings of all genres — from ancient epics to the
latest film song? Of course, anyone can. After all you need nothing
more than plain commonsense to know that it's a woman's body.
Used as they may be to this kind of endless "exposure", why do women
themselves feel ashamed and even "dirty" about standing in front of a
mirror and facing their own bodies? And when a rare woman dares to shed
inhibitions and speaks openly about her body and asserts that it is her
"own space", why is she instantly dubbed shameless, bad and even a blot
on our "pure" culture?
These were, quite predictably, the charges hurled when a few Tamil
women writers wrote about things forbidden — their own bodies, their
own spaces. Brickbats, interestingly, came from male writers who were
famous for their double entendre-loaded lyrics in Tamil films. One of
them went to the extent of urging people: "If you see them on the road,
slap them."
But these women were in no mood to show the other cheek. Those who were
directly under attack and others who believed women have the right to
speak about themselves came together to form a forum called Anangu
(meaning "women") which has since then fought patriarchal mindsets and
their ugly manifestations.
It was a report in Tehelka on this controversy that got documentary
filmmaker couple Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar interested in the
issue. Their film SheWrite brings together vignettes from the lives and
works of four women writers involved in the controversy — Salma,
Kuttirevathi, Malathy Maitri and Sukirtharani S. "This was particularly
interesting because we, as documentary filmmakers, are constantly
addressing questions of censorship. The way these women have fought for
their precarious spaces is inspiring," said Jayasankar at the recent
screening of the film at Centre for Education and Documentation.
Salma, the first woman featured in the film, lives in the small town of
Thuvarankurichi. An avid reader as a young girl, her schooling is cut
short when she and her friends dare to go to a film, which turns out to
be an adult film. Then begins the search for a husband and some suitors
reject her because she does "disgraceful" things such as writing poetry
and reading Lenin and Marx. Post-marriage, she writes under a pen name
and pretends sick and tells people at home that she is going to the
hospital and sneaks off to the launch of her book! She is now a
Panchayat President, which gives her a new sense of power, though
within a circumscribed space.
Kuttirevathi, on the other hand, believes that the most important and
creative space for a woman is her solitude. It is here that she
questions all established notions and rethinks her own self and what
surrounds her. Her bold and remarkable poem "Breasts", for instance,
looks at the "politics of breasts", rejects its representation as a
"plastic, quantifiable object". It then moves to the level of owning up
one's body on one's own terms.
The space that Malathy talks about is marked by her awareness of Dalit,
Leftist and Feminist thoughts. Her articulations have an activist edge
and she talks in the film about a period of lull in her writing, when
she couldn't decide if she should write romantic stuff like all others
or should write in the Marxist mould. She finally decides to write
about "herself and those like her".
Sukirtharani, a school teacher in Lalapet, writes boldly on body and
sexuality and the empowerment that comes with this articulation. In a
remarkable conversation at the end of the film, she tries to patiently
convince her aged mother why we should reject male-centric discourses
on the female body. This unselfconscious mother-daughter banter
reflects two worldviews and the manner in which they can touch each
other, if not come to a consensus all the time.
SheWrite shows that the four women writers have their own diverse ways
of carving out their space — ranging from finding a space within the
traditional community, marriage and so on to rejecting it and wanting
to breathe free beyond it all. But the space, for all of them, is
precious and what brings them together is the aspiration to doggedly
preserve it. Through an interesting play ofindia, the film visually
explores the spaces within and without.
The film moves between straightforward documentation style and a more
metaphoric representation as the narrative itself moves between
specific details of the women's lives and their creative works. Some
images — for instance, of two puppets churning in a washing machine as
Salma reads her poem on matrimony and of several rounded objects and
their reflection in two mirrors as Kuttirevathi reads her poem, Breasts
— manage to find visual reflections for the written word and lend it a
new dimension.
Posted on 7/6/2005 by K.P. Jayasankar
Subject: Review: TimeOut Mumbai
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.
“Jayasankar is an artist, his forte is visualisation,” She says. He
cuts in: “One of is us a left brain and the other is a right brain.”
They laugh heartily, and Monteiro continues. “ I do a lot of the
interviews and the writing, the people management. “He adds, “We’ve
spent so many years together, there’s no difference between personal
life and work at all.”
In their new collaboration, four women poets open their hearts, bare
their souls and set themselves up for slanderous rebuke and threats of
violence from their male compatriots. The film grew out of a report in
the Tehelkaweekly. Two Tamil film lyricists were getting outraged at
the “vulgar” and sexually frank poems that were flowing out of the pens
and hearts of modern women poets. The poems spoke of bodies, breasts,
bedrooms; of womanhood, patriarchy and loneliness. “ If you see them on
the road, slap them,” one of the men said. The other lyricist expressed
his desire to “kill them” if he ever met them. The women went into a
huddle and emerged as a team: they formed Anangu, a collective of
poets.
SheWrite meets four of these poets – Salma, Malathy Maitri,
Kuttirevathi and Sukirtharani, each distinct in personal history and
style, yet each with a heard-before story of oppression and eventual
resolution. “We were very excited by the powerful work coming out of a
grassroots context,” says Monteiro. The filmmakers scripted each of the
stories separately instead of mashing them together, so that each woman
gets the chance to leave a lasting impression.
The word “SheWrite” has the same intent and agenda as “herstory”. Both
the words imply that women’s experiences and sexual lives have been
silenced for decades and need voicing. “There were commonalties among
the four women, but there were also differences. Each has her own style
of negotiating relationship of power,” says Monteiro. The fact that the
women express themselves in Tamil adds a layer of marginality. “These
women are also writers in regional languages. We are so overwhelmed by
Indo-Anglian writing, we don’t hear voices from the so-called
backwaters,” Jayasankar says. “Also, there is an intolerance of any
mode of speaking up. You can’t even smoke in a film any more! In that
context, the work of the poets becomes more significant.”
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To sign petition against censorship atindian film
Rakesh Sharma
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
You may already know that over 250 film-makers inindia ( collectively
known as the Campaign against Censorship/ Films for Freedom) have been
protesting against censorship of independent films for the last couple
of years. Some of you may know of Vikalp - the firstindian festival of
documentary films that we organised in 2004 as a protest against
censorship at Mumbai International film festival. |
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Take the scissors away from the Censor Board- HT
Rakesh Sharma
Saturday, October 29, 2005
The Government ofindia thinks you are stupid, I am an imbecile, indeed
each person who steps into any cinema hall is an idiot. The Government
is deeply concerned about us, which is why it has appointed wise men to
take care of us. Collectively, they inhabit this space called the
Censor Board and toil day and night to keep us from plunging headlong
into a life of sin. Their boss is usually a retired or out of work
actor. He may have molested countless women on screen or she may have
gyrated in a sequined bikini, but they discover hitherto hidden
reserves of morality as soon as they are appointed to the Censor
Board... |
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