Goddesses: A story of three “ordinary” women

By Rwita Dutta • Aug 12th, 2008 • Filed under: Documentary, Film Review, Highlights, featured

Rwita Dutta writes about Leena Manimekhalai’s Goddesses that won the Golden Conch for best Indian Documentary Film at 10th MIFF

Goddesses

Leena Manimekhalai is a woman with various potentials from Tamil Nadu. Publisher-Editor of the film journal “Thirai” bears the testimony of her passion for quality films. A social activist, she picks up films as her medium of expression. She harped on subjects like child labour, caste and gender discrimination with tremendous ease and vigor. She is a producer who had her occasional tryst with television, radio even acting.

“Kanavupattharai” is the media house she owned which had already published twenty titles on world cinema and literature.

Her latest documentary “Goddesses”(42mns/2007/DVD) has received the Golden Conch for best Indian Documentary Film in this year’s MIFF. The film rather naively took us to probe into the lives of three most ordinary women, belonging to the southern part of the country. Leena believes in certain ideologies and she probably found the seeds in three of them. Laksmi, Krishnaveni and Sethuraku, all are enormously mundane souls whom we often choose to ignore unless and until someone like Leena with her unique visionary skill, rather drags us to trace the extraordinariness in them. With upper caste and class women being more and more reticent, India’s Women movement probably harp on the shoulder of theses three goddesses or many like them.

Goddesses

Lakhsmi, the “funeral singer” lives in Thiruvannamalai. Deserted by her husband and children, she lives a coarse life. She has undergone too many hardships as a single woman. She works as a professional mourner, she beats her chest aloud, gather drummers and other mourners but never forgives lousy men around her.

Sethuraku, the “fisher woman” with her family keeps on living within the forbidden zone of the seashore because Sea is her only way of survival. Where women never ventured out on the sea, she is at ease even after doing a man’s job for years. Being well conversant with the nature of sea, she well understood the misdeeds of trawlers onto the sea life.

She fell out of school and started going to the sea at the age of four. Now, a middle aged woman, without any modern gadget for fishing, she sometimes end up catching conchs and shells instead of fishes and sell them to earn meagre 30 rupees a day.

Puducherry and its inhabitants know Krishnaveni, the “gravedigger” at a go. She is single, does not mind carrying corpse and buries them in graveyard in midnight without anybody’s help. No sentiments attached she has learned over the years the methods of surviving through odds.

The Director has delve deeper into these women’s lives, presented the stories as simply as possible, yet created a deep impact onto the viewers to have earned the topnotch award of the country. These three women have survived the darkest of times and gone against societal norms to live according to the rules they have set for themselves.

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