Wellywood Woman

Leena Manimekalai   At the recent Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), women wrote and directed six of the fourteen films competing for its major competition for first-time feature makers. And Satyen Bordoloi wrote an article, It’s Raining Women Filmmakers in Mami This Year . *  I questioned him about the MAMI article. Last year, I said, MAMI had an all-women jury headed by Jane Campion. The people who run this festival must be pro-women, that’s wonderful. No, he said. Until he mentioned it, the organizers didn’t even realise that there were so many women’s films. Rashid Irani, senior film critic and a selection committee member said to Satyen: When I’m talking to you, I realize that one of the most unprecedented things for any festival is that in the competition we have 6 debut women filmmakers...And each one of them is such a stunning debut that you have to see it to believe it. They’d just chosen the best films. That’s all. I continued to argue with Satyen. Women’s films are...

I've amended this post slightly since I first wrote it, as a sequel to an earlier post which celebrated the high proportion of women-directed features that were in contention for the Australian Film Institute's annual awards. We share a name, Aussie and New Zealand women, though I don’t hear it often now: we’re Sheilas. According to my dictionary, ‘our’ Sheila came from shaler , of unknown origin. But I look up shale, defined as soft finely stratified rock that splits easily, consisting of consolidated mud or clay and I think earth mother, split . And I see all those immigrant men engaging with the earth of their new lands. With few women around. And I go AH. Jan Chapman producer of Bright Star —one of the films in contention for an AFI award—with  director Jane Campion But Australian women filmmakers have a very different history than we do. Renowned producer Jan Chapman summarised their early feminist years in her Longford Lyell Lecture in 2002. There was a Sydney Fi...