I admit not crying when I heard about 16th december rape incident in Delhi. I was in Los Angeles shooting in UCLA vicinity, read Los Angeles times next day, wiped a tear and kept the newspaper back. I didn’t remorse and I couldn’t be a defiant.
Watched ‘India’s daughter’ by Leslee Udwin last night and couldn’t stay inside four walls of my house, had to leave home, picked up the keys, sat under the sky very close to the full moon, I was stifling and then few tears rolled down the cheeks, for Jyoti singh or for the culture that makes rapes possible I still don’t know.
For an hour I wasn’t a screenwriter or a filmmaker, which is generally impossible for me while watching any form of art. Shooting a documentary is indeed difficult, film-maker travels through all the lanes of truth or that incident which is not easy. I have had a hard time myself shooting some of the heaviest and painful truths of life around us and after you are done with editing the final cut of the film, you are scared to go back to those neighborhoods, they haunt, they truly do. While ‘Born into Brothels’ stayed with me for several days, this film will vanish soon and didn’t work so well for me though it did transcend me in that bus and act resounded in my head but film didn’t let me through that non-fictional world fully. All notions of paradigms and foolproof film models for public stimulation are nonsense, this film has seemingly created connect with the victim and disconnect with assassins cannot excite audiences on the six continents and live in revival for decades. Every such film should enable audience to find similarities between the convict’s mindset and ofcourse each one of us. ‘India’s Daughter’ unearths a human experience and then wraps itself inside depicting victim blaming as an act specific to the rapist or his legal defenders and author an outrage over victim blaming not because victim blaming per say is problematic, but through building a narrative of the victim as one who did not deserve blaming because she had proved herself to be the normative ‘good girl’. What if there was a victim who was not so studious who perhaps was not as sensitive to the plight of the less privileged, or who had perhaps sneaked out of her house without informing her parents to watch a movie with a boyfriend? Well, the incident raised two core issues of rape culture was not an outcome of act of rapist but all those justifications and that every women has an unconditional right of not being raped.
Towards the last section, engagement with the statement ‘ hang the rapist’ only confirms this attempt and reduces the significance, remember Mukesh’s statements where future victims are pertinent and the juxtapositions. Master storytellers crave double-edged counter and Leslee you only proved to be a discoverer just when limit would tend to zero and not an explorer parting forest leaves, we step wide-eyed into an untouched society, a cliché-free zone where the ordinary becomes extraordinary where we don’t escape life but find life.
Interestingly few years ago like every other Delhi girl, I found myself in similar situation with one of my boyfriends, we offered those bunch of drunk men some money while they threatened us and thus avoided the mortal situation. I felt so alone in those very moments, I didn’t want to be a girl. And then there was this portion from my film ‘Baano’ where I played protagonist and shot this long rape scene, it was a mere emblematic shot but hell broke with those re-takes. A much heavier and stronger man strangling me and I hardly could retaliate on account of being physically weaker and then those few seconds where you give in as you cannot struggle more, you can hardly move, you really cant. I said ‘CUT’ myself after the scene and just left the set for the whole day. For the first time in my life I could empathize with all those stories I read about rapes and little girls, I felt iota of that misery and I didn’t want to be a girl once again.
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