In India, two topics disturb like no other. Disability and sexuality remain subjects that are sidelined in the mainstream. This is what makes Button Hole, a 24-minute short on the sexual desires of an adolescent autistic boy, by singer and poet Mitul Dutta, an important film. It has been nominated in the Best Short Film category for the upcoming (March 28) 7th New Delhi Film Festival (NDFF).
The film begins with the boy being unable to pass a button of his school uniform through a buttonhole to his growing anguish, after which his mother comes over and helps him. This act of passing a button through its buttonhole is the central metaphor in the story. It represents his inability to come to grips with his pubescent body and his understanding of his own sexual development. Dutta paints a sensitive portrait of a mother-and-son family—the husband being out of the picture—and of the boy, who is bullied at his school for being different. The movie shows them navigating a difficult and confusing time in their lives together, though the ending holds out hope.
Dutta is a recipient of several awards for her writing, including the Sahitya Akademi Travelling Grant, Sanskriti Award, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad’s Yuva Puraskar, Krittibas Puraskar and the ministry of culture’s Junior Fellowship in Literature. The film, Dutta says, is based on events from her own life. Her sister passed away in an accident in 2021, leaving behind a daughter, and an autistic son, who is 17. After his mother’s death, and his father’s remarriage, Dutta started taking care of him. This is when she found out about the difficulties that autistic children go through during their teenage years.
“He was never given any therapy or support while growing up. He did not talk or express himself,” says Dutta about the ignorance of people towards the needs of children with disabilities. She got her nephew a voice therapist but the more difficult part, however, was the boy’s inability to differentiate between a private and a public life. He considered his private parts his “toys”, which he would want others to see as he played with them. Dutta sought advice from a friend, the mother of an autistic child herself, and also a teacher for children with disabilities; she recommended assigning the boy a ‘private time’ for himself. This, Dutta says, is where the idea for the film stemmed from.
Dutta states that Indian cinema has, in recent years, focused considerably on “challenges faced by children and the role of parents and society in general in tackling these challenges”. However, the physical challenges occurring with the approach of puberty and the child’s response towards a new-found sexual identity remain somewhat unexplored, says Dutta.
Button Hole is an exploration of this territory. Button Hole is Dutta’s debut as a filmmaker and the film had its first screening at the International Purple Fest, Goa, this January. Comparing the treatment of its subject matter to films like Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par (2007), also on an autistic boy, filmmaker Partha Prathim Ghosh wrote in a review that in Button Hole, “the triumph of the life force is married easily to the sexual liberation of a young adolescent.”
For Dutta, the film is as much about autism and adolescence as it is about parenting. “The film is not only about adolescent autistic boys but is also about new-age parenting,” she says. The mother in the film guides her son, without qualms, through his puberty. He develops a liking for an empathetic girl at school, disregarding the taunts of his classmates.
The film, in its short running time, weaves a story that is deeply rooted in a very practical understanding of the needs of children with challenges and tells it in a moving manner. Not once does it fall into any form of sentimentalism or superfluity. The message is clear. There is no one-size-fits-all way of parenting or a fixed path to growing up.