Bringing a distinctive female perspective into filmmaking

Hailing from Pondicherry, Earthling has been making films for the last 16 years with her local team, Accessible Horizon Films. My Body is not the first of Earthling’s films to strike a major chord with audiences in Auroville. Two of her films have won the Cinema Paradiso Award at past Auroville’s International Film Festivals: her feature-length film Ashwamithra (Horse-friend, 2019), and her documentary Metroxical New York (2013). 

So perhaps Auroville provides a receptive ground for the themes Earthling explores, and the way in which she explores them? Or perhaps, while her films may depict a Tamil-centric world, they have a global resonance that stems from the way they speak to the burning issues of the day – like sexual harassment – that are currently being debated around the world? 

As Earthling sits down to discuss her filmmaking and life, her gentle voice belies her steely determination to offer an alternative filmmaker’s perspective on the “pressing issues that the universe needs to address” – a perspective that she suggests can be both “powerful” while also bringing “the gentleness of the feminine into filmmaking”.

Becoming a filmmaker

As Earthling recounts her upbringing in Pondicherry, she emphasises that her family’s values and practices were very unusual for the time. “The freedom I had from my parents was very progressive considering this culture,” she says. “They have been a big support and their efforts towards gender equality have always been empowering and inspiring.” 

After gaining her degree in architecture in Kerala, Earthling practiced architecture for 18 months in Chennai and the Emirates, but she quickly became disillusioned. “They were building skyscrapers, and there was so much money involved. When I realised I had no creative freedom, I quit.”

Writing had always been a part of her life, and she soon published her first book of short stories, Reckless Perceptions. She and her childhood friends decided to make a film of the book’s first story, and the story’s title – Accessible Horizon – became the name of their film production company. Earthling is the sole female member of the four-fold team that also comprises Ramesh, Raghu and Mohandas, and she emphasises the team has remained aligned in values over the last 16 years – “a rare thing” – that underpins the team’s sustainability. 

After moving to the USA in order to push their creative boundaries and to fulfil their curiosity to travel, they began making documentaries about social issues in India and screened them at various film festivals in different parts of the world. One of the documentaries made in the USA focused on the subway musicians of New York. And on their visits to India, they made documentaries about sustainable development and rickshaw drivers (Men of Burden), and on an alternative school for street children of Chennai (Wings of Evolution).

Imbibing the spirit of independent filmmaking

Earthling describes the team’s modus operandi as a “floating hierarchy” in which they rotate the roles of director, cinematographer, writer and editor, in order to help realise each other’s visions. Gaining formal funding or turning a profit is not a priority. “Between us, we transcend money. We think ‘This project is important, let’s put money into that.’ We don’t think ‘It’s my money, your money.’ No matter whose film it is, we’re all there. That backing is a huge privilege.”

While the Accessible Horizon team has always operated outside the mainstream film system, this was not necessarily their initial intention. After 10 years in the USA, the team decided to move back to India to pursue filmmaking full-time, and tried to approach producers from the mainstream Tamil film industry to fund their script. When that didn’t work, the team was therefore catalysed to pool their own savings to make their first independent Tamil feature film, which Earthling co-wrote, Ayynoorum Ayynthum – 500&5, and many friends helped in the filmmaking process. They released the film online, and also created video tutorials on their DIY process, including how they made their own track dolleys.

In over 30 meetings with producers and distributors after the film was made independently, Earthling and her team discovered the attitudinal hurdles were just as big as the financial ones. She recounts having faced “ruthless” patriarchal situations. “The distributors would totally invisibles to me and talk only to the men in my team. I wondered, ‘Why am I encountering such a huge patriarchal force like this?’ After a point, I decided that I could not ever interact with the so-called mainstream.”

This experience was not the only reason the team lost interest in participating in the mainstream Tamil cinema. Earthling points to the nature of the mainstream narratives: “The language of films bothers me,” she underlines. “There’s so much normalised misogyny in the majority of the Tamil films, so I’ve never been interested in that.

“Independent filmmaking was a powerful experience, a revolutionary movement, and the process was beautiful,” she says. “We went to a lot of film festivals and won awards, but all of that doesn’t mean anything if you can’t distribute it in your own region of Pondy and Tamil Nadu, which we couldn’t.”

Building on her experience in scriptwriting, Earthling began directing her own films in 2017, beginning with the short Malayalam language film Anthadhi (End-Beginning). Essentially a conversation between two young women in love, Earthling initially resisted the urge to label it as an LGBT film because she wanted to normalise depictions of non-heteronormative relationships. But she faced a dilemma: because she did not label it so, the film did not reach the LGBT community as much as it did when she later added the label. The film was invited to participate in many film festivals and it won the Devaki Warrier Memorial Award for women’s empowerment in Kerala. During her last visit to the USA in 2019, Earthling made a documentary film, Artryst – A Fluid Affair, about an artist who does drag performance, which is currently screening in various public spaces in USA.

The spark for Ashwamitra, the first feature drama film she directed, came from her time as a volunteer reiki practitioner in a hospice in America. She saw many sick children in the hospice in silence and pain, and this sparked the idea of a child character who is unable to speak. “I enjoy pathos and tragedy, but I also want to give hope in my films. So I really wanted to show how the healing of trauma happens, and how parents can learn to connect at a child’s level.” While Ashwamitra won the Cinema Paradiso Award in Auroville’s film festival and generated interest in various other forums, the team couldn’t release the film. But Earthling affirms that she’s simply content with the process of making films.

My Body

The spark for her new Tamil short film, En Udambu (My Body), came from a documentary she started making called Objectification of Women in Media, which was in turn inspired by her observations of the way women are presented and treated in the Indian film industry. “Women are used as props or eye candy,” she says of contemporary films, contrasting them with films made in the 1970s by male Tamil filmmakers that sensitively portrayed “real women, strong women, without objectification.” “In today’s films, the male protagonist or hero will always have a purpose,” she explains. “The woman will not have a purpose; she merely pushes him to his goal. Movies like that are so toxic, especially in their depiction of rape. Forget about the woman being the victim of something so painful – it’s always the man’s experience which is highlighted, such as a husband ‘accepting’ his wife, or a father taking revenge. There is not a single mention of the girl’s healing. And she is portrayed as feeling guilty about being raped, but why should she? And when directors create ‘powerful’ female characters, such as a businesswoman or superhero, they make the woman ‘manly’. That is, she will not cry, and will never be vulnerable. They just put male clichés into a woman.”

The documentary planned to examine three themes from a female perspective: the patriarchy of the global film industry; the roles of female performers globally; and the ‘item numbers’ (songs with obscene lyrics) in Tamil films. After interviewing 40 women from around the world for the documentary, she lost hope initially. “The saddest thing was, there was no woman who was not sexually harassed or body shamed. It’s the same everywhere.”

As she looked at the films of Tamil male directors, she noticed particular tropes and clichéd narratives, particularly concerning female characters being blackmailed by men who threatened to ruin their reputations. “The male mainstream directors always make the woman character kill herself,” Earthling points out. “And then the parents or the boyfriend take revenge. And it’s endlessly the same shaming. The victim’s healing is not addressed.” Earthling points out that these narratives are rooted in Indian cultural values that deem the woman’s body to be ‘sacred’, meaning that when she is violated, people say that the woman has become impure to the extent that the woman starts to hate her own body. And when women internalise the shame – sometimes to the extent of taking their own lives –  these beliefs around impurity become normalised in the wider Indian culture. 

As Earthling considered these themes, she decided put the documentary on ‘pause’ and to take the themes in a new creative direction.

Wanting to offer an alternative end to the conventional blackmailing narrative, Earthling wrote an original script for a drama in which the female character reacts in an unpredictable way when two blackmailers challenge her existence. The multiple screenings of My Body in Auroville have been packed out, and have been followed by dynamic discussion sessions, often with heightened emotions as viewers discuss content that many find confrontational. 

Many audience members at the Auroville screenings expressed that this was the first time they had participated in a discussion on such a topic, either in public or private. Some told of experiences that they had never shared with anyone before. People of all backgrounds and genders expressed that they were speaking up despite their discomfort, because they felt that the worldwide problem of toxic male behaviour and harassment of women was pervasive and needs to be addressed. “This film was really raw,” says Earthling as she considers why it has struck such a strong chord with audiences. “It came from a place of collective grief. When people connect to it, I feel we’re all breathing that collective grief together. It’s time for that change to happen.” 

Earthling emphasises that women’s protests are not sufficient to stop the practices. “Men should start calling out other men,” she asserts. “The other day at a screening it happened. Two men got into heated debate. I like that. It means the film has done something.”

Earthling was clear she wanted to take a different approach from conventional narratives that show perpetrators thrown into jail. “The law doesn’t work, and most perpetrators are acquitted in one week,” she asserts. “My focus is on healing. If a woman empowers herself, starts loving her body, and does not let a stranger get in the way of that, then the toxic patriarchy will collapse eventually.” Another aspect of the film that has struck a chord with local audiences is the natural look of the lead female character and the way she feels empowered within her body. 

Earthling perceives her approach to filmmaking and writing as ‘artivism’: art that encourages the transformation of harmful social practices. Given that a number of Auroville’s outreach services have taken up the My Body film as a conversation starter amongst their own teams about sexism, harassment and body shaming, it seems that her mission of practical and attitudinal change is well underway. But Earthling’s ‘artivist’ goal also includes the healing of women’s “collective grief” that arises from harassment and shaming. “I realised, if it’s time for something to be addressed, the universe will speak through somebody, through us artists. 

I always feel the universe speaking through me.” 

Hobbies, causes

meeting with the renowned clown doctor Dr. Patch Adams in the USA in 2007, Earthling became involved with the School for Designing A Society in Illinois. She documents the artivism in the school sessions, and also does medical clowning. 

Her team also works in animal rescue in Pondicherry, and they hike together on seedball treks in South India, where they scatter native seeds wrapped in clay and manure which then germinate naturally. Earthling emphasises that reading is an integral part of her everyday routine, especially poetry and graphic novels from her personal collection. She has also been taking violin lessons in the western classical tradition for the past five years, both in the USA and Auroville. 

Earthling has had a long connection to Auroville, stemming back to her college days, when she would visit Auroville with her team to drink chai. She undertook a filmmaking residency in Auroville in 2013, and she now lives in nearby Kuilapalayam. “I love the music concerts and the films. So, when we returned from USA, we decided to come and stay close by. I feel absolutely at home in Auroville.” 

As for joining Auroville, Earthling emphasises her need to travel outside for six months of the year, as she finds travelling and hiking in nature to be therapeutic and transformative. She’s also clear that she doesn’t want to be a part of any organisation. 

“I don’t like to be part of any ‘ism’. I am a multilayered being. That’s one of the main reasons I changed my name to Earthling – so I don’t get boxed anywhere. I chose Earthling to represent something bigger.”

As to whether she feels she’s developed a distinctive female filmmaking ‘voice’, Earthling suggests that it can be powerful to bring the feminine into filmmaking. She also points out that while she used to be “very hard and fast” about her convictions, her experiences of global travel and the overall “life process” have softened her stance. “I’ve mellowed over the years,” she smiles.