NEW DELHI: Jamia Millia Islamia University is hosting a film festival dedicated to the lives and ordeals faced by the women in their daily lives. The festival will screen films from India, Pakistan, Palestine and Bangladesh.
The film festival which opened on Tuesday is being organized by the Jamia cultural committee and the Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies is titled “Lives of Women”. The films are being screened at the Ansari Auditorium located inside the JMI campus and will run for three days.
The festival will screen some of the critically acclaimed films on the subject of women; films to be screened at this festival include critically acclaimed films such as renowned director Girish Kasaravalli’s Kannada film “Thaayi Saheba”, Aparna Sen’s “Parmitar Ek Din” and independent Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar’s “Khamosh Pani”.
The festival will also screen a film based on the life of domestic help Baby Haldar, who was abandoned by her mother when she was 4 year old, was married to an abusive husband at 12 became a mother at 13 but she was encouraged to write her story by her employer, there was little in her traumatic childhood to suggest that she would become an emerging star on India’s literary horizon.
Most of the films are set against the backdrop of violence, war and political turmoil taking place and how the character deals with them. Bangladeshi film “A Certain Liberation” captures the life of Gurudasi Mondal who lost her mental balance after watching her entire family killed in 1971 during the Liberation War of Bangladesh and continues to wander in the streets of Kopilmoni, a small town, in quest of all that she had lost.
Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar’s “Khamosh Pani” tells the story of a widowed mother and her young son set in the late 1970s in a village in Pakistan which is coming under radical influence.
The Palestine entry to this festival “Waiting….” tells a story of missing people -- boys and men -- who are picked up by security forces and then simply disappeared. Since the men are not declared “dead”, their wives are not widows but “half widows”, who now have to take up the role of a bread-earner for the family.
Other notable films that will be screened at the festival are “Buru Garra”, “Are They Potted Plants?”, “Arna’s Children”, “A Body that will speak” and “Mother Courageous”.
Needless to say all the films that will be screened will have English subtitles.