KOCHI: We teach our children good touch and bad touch, but why don’t we teach them to never practice the bad touch on someone? The Malayalam film Women With A Camera, which premiered at 26th IFFK on Monday, speaks about how an incident she experienced as a child haunts protagonist Athira Santhosh her entire life. The film, made by a group of journalism students from Ernakulam for Rs 5000, is being touted as the movie shot at the lowest budget at the festival.
Though the movie may seem like a casual conversation between friends, it throws light on unpleasant incidents that many kids had to go through in life, sometimes at the hands of their own family members. Some tend to repress it, while others live with it, not wanting to burden those around them with the truth. In the movie, a happy Athira turns conscious and moody after one of her cousins visits her house. A traumatic incident made her feel uncomfortable with his presence. Athira finally opens up about it to her mother and her friend Mahitha, a media student.
“When Athira shared an unpleasant incident that happened in her childhood, I felt it must be addressed. We both worked on the screenplay of the movie last year. It belongs to the Verite genre — a technique of filmmaking that thrives on candid realism. It was also an opportunity for us to explore the art,” says director Atal Krishnan. He says they deliberately made the movie low budget to protest the capitalism that exists in the industry.
“I wanted people, especially our parents, to stop normalising exploitation. It doesn’t matter if the exploitaion was done by someone close to our family,” says Athira.