Date: Thursday December 1, 2022

Time: 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM

Location: Online event

Join us for a Q&A with filmmaker Leena Manimekalai over Zoom as we discuss her film Maadathy (2021). The discussion will be moderated by Prof. Lalitha Gopalan (Dept. of Radio-Television-Film, Moody College of Communication).

Registration is required. The Zoom registration email confirmation includes a link to Maadathy so you can view the film before the Q&A.

Film Synopsis

India is a land of Subaltern deities. Each deity has an unique legend and these legends are often interwoven with socio-historic tropes of India.

Puthirai vannaar is an ‘unseeable’ Dalit caste group, in southern India.Their forced-occupation is to wash clothes of other Dalits, the dead and the menstruating women. This film is a tale about a young girl who grew up in Puthirai vannaar caste group and how she came to be immortalised as their local deity, Maadathy.

Director’s Statement

I have grown up listening to stories of my village female deities who were once ordinary women but had extra ordinary lives. Most of these goddesses were killed by injustice and hence were worshipped in order to save the village from their wrath. These legends of social suppression are always a great learning material to understand my roots and evolution of the society I live in.

While it is not a norm to have someone from an oppressed caste as heroes even in our folktales, as a story teller, I started pondering on making a film of an unseeable woman, of an accursed, of a nobody who is not even a statistic in a society that is deeply divided by an unjust caste system. I started my research, traced down the community, read all the least material available, did hours and hours of interviews, stayed with them for months together in the remote villages of south Tamilnadu in India and realised the script with their active inputs and participation.

Maadathy is my attempt to introspect what is it being an unseeable slave woman, living the lowest among the lowest, as a victim to both patriarchy and caste system.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Sponsored by:The South Asia Institute at UT Austin