Doosra Chasma: A travelling film festival to galvanize gender parity

Veils N Walls – a Pakistani film about four women who put their lives at stake to challenge the might of the Taliban; Nirnay – a non-fiction film tracing a young woman’s efforts to make sense of her own life and that of her friends in Ghaziabad; an engaging Iranian film Facing Mirrors about a women who drives a taxi in Tehran to support her son and herself following her husband’s incarceration; True love story, an Indian animation film that sings the glory of romance; and Pegue, a mixed media animation from UK about a girl in a conservative community struggling to come to terms with her gender identity.      

An interesting combo? This and many more films of this feather will rustle at the Whistling Woods Film Institute as part of the two-day film festival beginning on 9 October, titled ‘Doosra Chashma’ - a travelling campus film festival, mainly orchestrated for media students, but open to all.

The festival comes out of the commitment of the NGO Population First to work for gender parity and “a balanced, planned and stable population” and acknowledges the power of the moving image in aiding the same. Says Dr. AL Sharda, director of Population First, “Since Population First’s inception in 2003, we’ve been working with students, with the youth to sensitise them to issues concerning gender (the social and cultural definitions of man and woman as different from biological definitions) and using films in various ways to do this as imagery, dialogue, films get entrenched in minds easily. We screen short movies in colleges to start off discussions on the subject or encourage students to make one-minute movies on different gender issues. We felt we should hold a campus film festival that will showcase films with a gender perspective, drawn from around the world. This will help students to understand gender issues like gender violence without feeling they are being taught something. Also, it will make them see that a film with a gender perspective need not be boring; we expect the festival to impact students of journalism and film-making who are directly involved in mainstream communication as well as those inclined to work for corporates or NGOs. We need to counter the effects of mainstream cinema, be it Hindi films or Hollywood as these tend to reinforce gender stereotypes. The festival has been curated by noted film festival curator Smriti Nevatia with this agenda.”  

A goulash of non-fiction, short fiction, features, and animation from 11 countries, including an acclaimed new documentary from Egypt, Doosra Chasma is designed to spark off conversations on films and gender among students. “Since this festival is ​aimed mainly at ​fairly young ​film and media students, there was this ​idea of keep​ing it simple,” admits Smriti. “But I was ​also conscious that these are future ​media professionals. They ​must already be ​exposed to many things, they must be watching a lot of ​excellent world cinema. I did not wish to talk down to them. So I decided to choose ​good films​, and to support these with interactive sessions and discussions ​that help bring out the complexities.” Smriti who has recently authored a book on gender titled No outlaws in the gender galaxy, is emphatic that “any film festival on gender would be incomplete if it only talked about the man-woman binary, because there are other genders.” And she has taken care to include films that deal with the issue of gender identity even as she has accorded acres to films helmed by students from different geographies (the festival takes off with a movie kilned in the National Film School of Denmark by students). Doosra Chasma generates hope, because as Smriti points out, “we are mainly addressing the youth who have not yet become terribly set in their attitudes. So there is hope that this festival would make them more gender-sensitive, which would eventually show in their work.”

This conviction is at the heart of the collaboration formed by Meghna Ghai Puri, Director of Whistling Woods International, with Population First, to roll out this festival. “Cinema is one of the biggest influencers of society; the youth today get their cultural and educational inputs from films,” states Meghna. “As such, at WWI, we put a lot of emphasis on making our students socially responsible filmmakers. Even subtle changes in ads and films can make big differences in shaping people’s attitudes.” Meghna is proud to host the festival at WWI and looks forward to a robust participation by the institute’s own students firstly and students from other colleges and institutes. Doyen of media studies Jeroo Mulla, who feminized students in Sophia for decades, and now lectures on a visiting basis at Xavier’s, Sophia’s and Symbiosis, opines, “this festival will showcase contemporary films and that should engage the students and inspire change.”

All gung-ho about Doosra Chasma, Sharda is already dreaming of taking the festival across the country, to institutes in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, etc. and has already engaged in talks with the University of Kashmir to this end. “The need for gender sensitivity is keen all over the world,” affirms Sharda. And what better mode to promote it than through stories on celluloid, for the story form through which children are first educated about this world, still remains inarguably the easiest mode of absorption of values and knowledge by humans. Let the curtain rise!

The Doosra Chasma film festival will take place on 9 and 10 October from 10 am to 6.30 pm, at the 5th Veda Auditorium, Whistling Woods International (WWI) Film School, Film City Complex, Goregaon (East), Mumbai 400065, Maharashtra. Follow the schedule here.