No holds barred – Interview in The Hindu
SUDHISH KAMATH
LIFE & STYLE » METROPLUS CHENNAI, December 29, 2011
The HinduFiery Filmmaker Leena Manimekalai Photo: Thulasi Kakkat
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Brutally honest and emotionally raw, Leena Manimekalai speaks about her controversial and acclaimed film ‘Sengadal’ and her life’s many missions
She has constantly taken the side of the oppressed, fought the system, gone against the tide and continues to rebel, mincing no words to express what she feels. Brutally honest, emotionally raw and naturally poetic, 30-something independent filmmaker Leena Manimekalai is a real-life heroine battling the odds to fight for her artistic freedom and a passionate activist whose heart bleeds for her people.
Her tenth film “Sengadal — The Dead Sea”, also her debut feature, a docudrama on the plight of the fishermen community in Dhanushkodi who are caught between the devil and the deep sea for their survival, has created quite some buzz at the recent film festivals in Mumbai, Goa, Kerala and Chennai after winning a battle with censors.
One would assume that she feels vindicated and relaxed given the reception to “Sengadal” but ask her if her faith in the State is restored and she shoots back: “When you see the tooth of the lion, can you think it is smiling at you? I was born here. I vote every year and pay taxes. But this does not mean that the State can dictate or control my artistic expression. As a poet and a filmmaker I have been suffering hurdles in the way of free expression,” says Leena.
But the fact that “Sengadal” was chosen for the Indian Panorama section of the International Film Festival of India and the international competition at MAMI and the World Cinema section at the International Film Festival of Kerala gives her hope and has boosted her morale.
“What worries me is the politics of control working behind the system but I detest censorship of any form, constitutional or extra constitutional, as an artiste. Censorship is like mutilating my body organs.”
“Sengadal” has also been internationally acclaimed. “NAWFF Award at Tokyo, Montreal and Durban International Festivals and some ten more invitations for competitions at various International film festivals gives me a hope that I can aspire to do that one good film before I die.”
Given the rebel she has been all her life, has she ever felt patriotic? “No”, she says. “Don’t you think identities are a cross to carry? A woman, a Tamil, an Indian, an independent artiste, a Leftist all are thrust upon me. All these identities create borders and make us refugees or eligible citizens according to their lawbooks. How I wish I were a bamboo in a wild forest plucked by a musician to be sculpted as a flute.”
“A refugee will know what it means to have a country of his or her own. I feel I am from this ancient village stone weathered by kingdoms, occupations, colonial rulers, wars, emergencies, democracies but still immortal. An MNC may come and install a McDonald in my village but I will eat honey from my backyard. I am from that village the surveyor skipped to map on the atlas. And, of course, I will continue to vote for our democracy to mature, pay taxes and hold an Indian passport.”
She vents her angst through her art. “I am not loyal to any establishment. I challenge and betray my race, religion, caste, gender and everything encrypted on my existence and am a traitor in that sense. Fortunately I learnt to write — writing keeps me sane and non-violent. But I consider my own language as my first enemy. Like a blurb on one of my poetry anthology says: ‘History is pornography and I am its star’.”
Early influences
“I was born to a farmer mother and a Tamil professor father. My cradle was tied to the neem trees of the Western Ghats and I am this typical Kurinji (hills) woman. All my intensity is dedicated to the mangoes and the torching sun of my village. And my passions are drawn from the wild rivers and heroic stories of my village deities. Still my fore mothers hold my spirits and my fore fathers spell my knowledge. I owe my political existence to my readings on E.V.R. ‘Periyar’ and Marx. Ambedkar is one whom I yearn to master before my life term and I continue to draw inspirations from the whole ‘She’ gang.” And Leena lists them all — “Kamala Das, Mahashweta Devi, Andal, Rosa Luxemberg, Alexandra Kollantai, Sylvia Plath, Judith Butler, Arundhati Roy, Kathy Acker, Maya Deren, Agnes Varda, Sofia Coppola, Simone De Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo, Catherine Breillat and so many women who have lived fearless lives.”
On politics and criticism
Does it hurt her if “Sengadal” is criticised as a one-sided emotional propaganda film? “It is a simple depiction of our Tamil fishermen’s ability to live in the border shores of India and Sri Lanka amidst violence and oppression. It is about a failure of a filmmaker to make an impossible film. ‘Sengadal’ is about a lost dream of the Tamils of Sri Lanka to own their piece of land. It is people participatory work and not an author’s cinema, not perfectly made and never completed,” she says.
“When a film deals with current politics, it is immediately seen as some loud, explicit work. It is as delicate and complex and challenging for an artiste to handle politics around contemporary times. And the amount of energy you end up spending in activism than making the film itself is way too much and people should understand making an independent personal film in this country is actually a suicide attempt.”
Leena doesn’t let any of that come in her quest for perfection. As she completes work on her poetry film “My Mirror is the Door”, her tribute to the women poets of the Sangam era, she leaves for London next week as a Charles Wallace Scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She has a couple of other scripts and is also working on “Passport”, written by Shobasakthi that she plans to pitch to producers. “Hope my cloud rains and there’s a harvest.”
WHAT THE SEA SAW – A film on Tamil Fishermen comes ashore (Cover page article in EYE (Indian Express)
Tags : Tamil filmmaker, Leena Manimekalai,Sengadal, Mumbai Film Festival
Posted: Sun Oct 09 2011, 00:03 hrs
New Delhi:
After a fight against censorship, Tamil filmmaker Leena Manimekalai is ready to showcase her film Sengadal, the story of a fishing community living on the fringes of India, at the upcoming Mumbai Film Festival
It’s easy to find poetry in the landscape of Dhanushkodi — a fishing village located at the southern tip of Tamil Nadu’s Rameswaram island, surrounded as it is by vast stretches of sea. Easy, but presumptuous, considering how the fishing community of the village has had to bear the brunt of the three decade-long ethnic war in Sri Lanka, owing to its proximity to the island nation. It was this story of constant struggle against an idyllic natural landscape that appealed to Tamil filmmaker Leena Manimekalai, who captured it on celluloid over a year in 2009. The film, Sengadal (The Dead Sea), eventually became Manimekalai’s first attempt at feature after nine documentaries, but the going was anything but smooth.
Earlier this year, the Chennai Regional Censor Board refused a clearance certificate to the film, which talks about the atrocities of the Sri Lankan army against the Indian Tamils. The board found political references to the governments of India and Sri Lanka objectionable. The use of cuss words by fishermen was another ground for stalling its release. “The film is based on factual accounts. Collected from the interviews of fisherfolk, it strings together memories of horrific incidents that affected these people,” says Manimekalai. “For these fishermen, who were often ignorant of boundaries, whether on land or at sea, venturing into the ocean was a necessity to generate livelihood.” On a number of occasions, they ended up dead at the hands of Sri Lankan navy personnel who disposed of the bodies in the Indian Ocean.
After the intervention of the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal following a petition filed by her, the Federation of Film Societies and several civil rights activists, Sengadal was re-examined by the censor board. On July 25 this year, it was cleared without any cuts but with an ‘A’ certification. Months after getting the adult stamp and making its international debut at Durban and Montreal film festivals, the 100-minute film is now ready for its Indian premiere. It will be screened at the week-long 13th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF), which will starts on October 13. “This is the film’s first official screening in India even though it was screened at alternate venues like Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre earlier,” says the director.
Despite the hullabaloo, says the 33-year-old Chennai-based director, Sengadal is a film that was waiting to be shot. Manimekalai moved to Dhanushkodi with her camera and a small crew in February 2009, when the civil war in Sri Lanka was in its last stages. For the next four months, she shouldered the dual responsibility of directing the feature film as well as acting in it. “We adopted a participatory process during the making. The community was very involved. Several residents of Dhanushkodi also played out characters akin to their real life,” she says.
It was not easy initially to win their trust, but her frequent visits to the area slowly dissolved their reluctance. “The villagers became my extended family, helping me to get into the inner space of the community. I stayed and ate with them,” she says. Even when she overstayed beyond the permissible hour of 6 pm as decreed by the local naval post, they took care to hide her. “If a naval helicopter came out for surveillance when we were taking a boat ride, something we were not allowed to do, the fishermen quickly hid us under the deck,” she recollects. Thanks to such cooperation, she was able to shoot the film despite the constant vigil of coastal and navy personnel.
Training the villagers and making them act in this documentary-like feature was another challenge altogether. The director had no pre-determined narrative for the film. Initially, she worked without a script, accumulating the footage of the members of Dhanushkodi community talking about their perilous existence. “After I collected the raw material, I collaborated with writers C Jerrold and Shobasakhti to give it a formal structure,” she says. The film opens with Dhanushkodi waking up to two bodies washed ashore. This triggers a protest at the collector’s office, demanding justice. “This incident had taken place in the 70s. But we chose to incorporate that in our narrative.” Manimekalai has taken similar creative liberties of blending fact and fiction. For instance, the character of a half-wit Lankan refugee Suri, who is glued to a radio, is inspired by the story of a refugee who led a similar life.
During the filming, Manimekalai became an integral part of the narrative. Along with the protagonists — Munusamy, the fisherman, and Rosemary, the fisherwoman who turns into a social worker after losing her husband in a Sri Lankan navy encounter, and Suri — she tries to make sense of the chaos and hardship prevailing in this tiny village. Their interactions with Lankan refugees, their skirmishes with the Indian and Sri Lankan officials and their personal lives overrun by external events, form the crux of this “factual feature”. As Manimekalai went about collecting information about life disrupted, a bigger story of political negligence emerged. However, what stood out was the community’s constant struggle to live and their ability to keep hope afloat.
There is an undeniable universality to the story of this small fishing community, caught in a conflict zone.“People who are caught in border land conflicts, like those on the US-Mexico border, will be able to identify with Sengadal’s story,” says Manimekalai. This could be one of the reasons why it made the cut at the MFF’s International Competition in the category of the First Feature Film of Directors despite facing competition from nearly 40 Indian films. “The selection committee was impressed with the freshness in approach, wonderful photography and the way non-actors have been treated in the movie,” says MFF director Srinivasan Narayanan.
Despite the appreciation, Sengadal will probably be screened only once, at the festival. “The movie should have proper screenings and be seen in theatres,” says fellow documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan. In fact, Manimekalai is already exploring the possibility of a commercial release. “When you make this kind of films, you have to show it to a wider audience,” she says. The director is now gearing to release the film locally. In the worst possible scenario, she is planning “a symbolic release” of the film in around 15 theatres. This may also ease the financial constraints she faced while making the film. After her first producer backed out, Global Films Initiative, a San Francisco-based organisation which promotes independent filmmakers, stepped in with a $10,000-grant. Later, producer Janaki Sivakumar helped her complete the project.
Manimekalai is, however, not new to the struggle. This engineering graduate, armed with a camera, a microphone and an editing software on her computer, found her true calling in making documentaries in 2001 when she made Mathamma. In it, the Left-leaning poet-cum-activist-turned-director talked about the prevailing custom of devoting girls to the deity in the Arundhatiyar community of Tamil Nadu. It was followed by Parai, which brings the violence against Dalit women to light. Her later films — Break the Shackles, Love Lost, Waves after Waves, Connecting Lines, A Hole in the Bucket and Goddesses — all capture the story of India that exists on the fringes.
Manimekalai has a couple of scripts ready, in collaboration with Shobasakthi, the author of the novel Gorilla. One of them focuses on the life of Tamil Muslims and is titled Fourth Caliba, while the other is titled Passport. The latter is a road film based on the life of a Sri Lankan Tamil youth caught between the government and the LTTE. “There is a constant fight between the artist and the activist in me. Maybe I am an ‘artivist’,” she says about her choice of subjects. In spite of that, she is reluctant to term her work as issue-based cinema. She chooses to call them “stories of living” instead.