At first glance, Shoby (Parvathy Thiruvothu) and Miriam (Rima Kallingal) seem to be having what looks like a mundane day, wearing their burqas with a heart pinned in the front, and speaking their mind in Mumbai where religious hatred is casually thrown at them every other day. This is, until they meet a young girl Lalanna (Nakshatra Indrajith), who shakes their core. Director Megha Ramaswamy presents this child, at the centre of Lalanna's Song (now out on Mubi), as someone who opens the protagonists' eyes through an unsettling tragedy. Megha believes that, along with her, every woman she has met is a Lalanna. "We all go through moments where we’re pushed off the cliff by people. Some of us survive; some don’t. The short Lalanna’s Song is an homage to both—those who made it and those who didn’t. But at its core, it’s really about the women who were pushed off the cliff in the first place," she says.
Megha, who wrote Bejoy Nambiar's Shaitan (2011) and made her directorial debut with the Netflix film What Are The Odds (2020), confesses that although she wanted to cast Rima and Parvathy from the get-go, she thought they wouldn't be interested in the film. "Geetu Mohandas, who I was collaborating with at the time, introduced me to them. She suggested, 'Why don’t you reach out to them?' It just clicked," she reveals. For her, magic wasn't just in the film and its surrealistic themes, but also within the actors. "Trust me, when I saw them together, I became even more ambitious about my project. They instantly understood the importance of making space for all kinds of women. With actors like Rima and Parvathy, who are so instinctively intelligent, you don’t need to sugarcoat characters for them," she adds.
Shoby and Miriam are flawed, but strong women. They speak about men in passing and discuss sex and intimacy despite the stigma surrounding it. These were intentional choices for Megha, who shares that even though it is normal for all genders to have a conversation about it, she finds it interesting to explore the awkwardness men feel when women discuss this topic. "Honestly, if two men were writing a scene like this, they’d probably turn it into a rape scene, because that’s how they often frame it. When men talk about sex in a populist, cinematic way, it often comes across as crude or crass. Women, on the other hand, can dignify their experiences—whether it's sex, violence, or the complexities of love in relationships," she says.
Megha often chooses children as her protagonists. Be it in the short Bunny (2015) or the documentary short Newborns (2014), it is through their lens that the story often takes a different form altogether. "I think we’re at our most vulnerable and our most honest when we’re children. That’s when we truly experience the rawness of being human. We become a certain person because of the repercussions of that period in our lives," she notes, adding that her memory of the time stands out in her entire life. "I think I was a different kind of person as a child—more connected to that raw honesty. And it's that memory that helps me maintain that sense of truthfulness in my characters," she says.
This visceral memory manifested as horror while writing Lalanna's Song. "What could be a greater horror than societal oppression?" Megha elaborates, as she also comments on her lead characters' religion playing a crucial role in the film—Shoby, a Hindu, and Miriam, a muslim. "Horror has always served as a voice for communities facing injustice. It comes from a world that refuses to listen. The oppression that the characters face isn’t just general—it breaks down into specific systems, like brahminical oppression, or caste and religious oppression. Women are forced into wearing burqas, for example. Miriam directly points it out to Shoby that this is her local oppression, and as an upper-class Brahmin, she is disconnected from it," she says.
With her short, Megha also intends on emphasising the impact of how brahminical oppression leads to appropriation of marginalised spaces, and the behavioural change that microaggressions bring about in people. "Savarna women fetishise marginalised communities and take over their spaces. They don’t realise how easily they do this. Speaking of savarna women, I am one myself. So, there’s a lot of introspection that goes into writing a character like Shoby," she underlines, stating that it fearful of what's happening in the country concerning these incidents.
Lalanna’s Song received honourable mention at the 2022 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) and was nominated for two other awards. However, she feels that women storytellers must be given more space. “We have to go through so many festivals, win awards, receive glowing reviews, just to be acknowledged. Why should we have to put in all that extra work when our male counterparts—who, frankly, don’t always deliver—are constantly given chances?” she questions.
Just like how Lalanna has stayed with Megha, long after the film’s curtains came to a close, she says that she harbours many such stories about women within herself. “I'm not interested in stories about men — we've heard enough of them. These stories have mostly been told by men, and now, telling stories about women has become the new trend. But the male gaze is something I just can't carry or subscribe to. It doesn’t belong to me,” she concludes.