Issue that touches everyone

``Kutty'' revolves round child labour. CHITRA MAHESH talks to Janaki Vishwanathan about the film that leaves a lump in your throat.

IT IS only when the lights dim and intermission is announced that you realise you are only watching - because till then you felt you were part of the story of a little girl and the family into which she is taken as a help - a family which is perhaps just like yours and mine - a family which is caught up in the vortex of daily living - a family that is in a way responsible for the destruction of a young life.

This is something that happens all the time - but made extraordinary with the help of celluloid, lasting images and tunes. It wrenches your heart making it feel heavy with sadness and an irrevocable sense of loss. Of a childhood denied, of the startling yet common presence of poverty and the big world out there that has no pity. The reality hits you in the last frame - when innocence leads to dreams unrealised and when the same innocence is turned over to commerce and a life of utter hopelessness.

You go home with that aching feeling that in some way you have contributed to that little girl's loss of a right to life as a human being - you also realise that though you know of such incidences you have not really done anything about it - and finally you feel you have to do something to see if in your own small way you can prevent such things from happening. Is this not what good cinema ought to do? To make you think and react?

This is what ``Kutty'' seeks to do - a film that makes no pretences of being a great film - it does not preach, at least not in the frames - it does not even want to be categorised as art cinema or mainstream - all it wants to do is to emphasise with some facts of life things that can be altered with some care, attention and resolutions.

Then you turn your attention to the unassuming person who made it - Janaki Vishwanathan the young journalist turned film-maker who takes your breath away with her simplicity and her beliefs. Meeting her at her residence on Lloyds Road - casually dressed in a white salwar kameez attending to normal household chores, she talks at length on this project. It all started one can say in retrospect when she started writing about cinema in the Indian Express. But then marriage happened and then children.'' But after my daughter was born, I wanted to go back to doing something. I've always been interested in writing; right through school writing has always been a passion with me. And when I went for my internship as part of the Masters' course to the Indian Express cinema and its contents was what a group of us wanted to write about. It's not that I consciously chose to write about cinema. But that was one of the options open for freelance.''

After her Masters, full time jobs with the India Today Group Asian News International, TV 18, with shows like (Amul India, MTC etc) gave her experience in terms of subjects and variety to write and experiment with two different mediums. Somewhere boredom set in.

Soon a move to Delhi on the part of her husbandled to a change of interests and a point where exposure to grassroots movements, and developmental issues, (which her husband was specialising in associaiton with NGOs and other non profit organisations) set her on a different path. Development aspect was what her husband wanted to work on and he associated himself with many micro finance projects funded by the U.N. and the World Bank. Micro finance she says is all about people at the grassroots and it meant, a lot of direct interaction with them. ``That gives you a lot of exposure to what is really happening there and what the real issues are.''

And this helped her get an insight into problems that one normally just reads about. ``It opened me to what life is all about.'' She wanted to make documentaries and a few friends got together and approached the Ford Foundation for a grant. They set out to make two documentaries, one on the Chidambaram Dikshitars and the other on the silk reelers of Bhagalpur, Bihar, which is yet to be completed. Meanwhile she worked on a project for Vijay TV called ``Kadhal Chevvai''.

While working on Sivasankari's ``Knit India through Literature'' as a translator she did an interview with Santosh Sivan for the Amul India show when he told her,``Why don't you try your hand at cinema? Might not be such a bad option at all''. What this ace cinematographer said struck a chord somewhere. She mentioned this to Sivasankari who gave her a novelette written by her - about 100 odd pages - and asked her to see what she could do with it.

``I read it and it inspired me. I shared it with my husband Ramesh and he said, `this is in tune with what we're thinking. It's about an issue, which is touching, the lives of a whole lot of people. So let's go ahead and get started.'''

And then they went about strengthening the characters, fleshing them out and making them come alive visually.

``Kutty is the tale of a ten-year old girl, Kannamma, from a village, brought to the city so she could contribute to her family's meagre income. A family takes her as domestic help. The family consists of a working couple, their son, a baby, and the mother-in-law. What Kannamma goes through there and where she eventually ends up is what the film details rather graphically. Ramesh Arvind, Kausalya, Vivek and Shweta are in the cast among others, along with Thankar Bachchan (camera), Sreekar Prasad (editing), Ilaiyaraja (music), Krishnamurthy (art direction), Mu. Mehta, (lyrics).

``I think all of us can empathise with Kausalya who plays the young working mother. Most women, particularly those in the urban and our strata can empathise with her because we have our own concerns. We do notice a lot of things but then our own circumstances draw boundaries around us and we are not really able to cross that. This film is not about heroes and heroines - it is about ordinary people who are sensitive but are not able to rise above their circumstances. I think the dialogue in the car really sums it all up. Ramesh Arvind who plays the husband says, ``We have this lifestyle to lead and for that you and I have to work. In order to do that we need somebody at home to take care of the kids.''

So though this film is about child labour, Janaki has introduced a lot of other issues, which are both urban-and-rural-related. Like for example the way the girl child is perceived and how women themselves think that a girl has to be brought up in a particular way. Janaki has also wanted to show how a father (Nasser) an uneducated potter man, really loves his daughter and it does not matter to him that she is a girl. He just wants to give her the best in life. And as for the mother, she is practical and pragmatic always feeling that the girl would profit more from learning the traditional work than dreaming about an education, which would or would not feed a family.

What is unique is the performance of the little girl Shweta as Kannamma. ``Shweta is Santosh's find. She won the National award for ``Malli''. She is amazing - I mean she is so childlike in the sense that you catch her happily munching on a Five Star bar between shots. But the minute you tell her the shot is ready she transforms herself. There is only so much a director can do - there must also be some innate ability in that child to just transform in front of the camera. She studies in Holy Angels School and many could not believe that she was not a rustic kid from a village,'' Janaki says.

``Of course we had to explain, prepare her for a shot. `You are not Shweta. You must step into the shoes of Kannamma. So this is the way Kannamma feels.' For instance in the sequence with Vivek, where the child goes and asks him to write home she describes her village as one which has a pond, a tree, a temple and she thinks it's only her village which has all these. She doesn't realise that there are thousands of villages like it.''

Was it difficult to get artistes for the film? ``Not too difficult because once the story was narrated to them (Nasser, Kausalya, Vivek for instance) they were enthusiastic and a lot of resources were pooled in. It was a collective effort.''

Shooting began in December and finished in March. And other than filming in Chennai, scenes were shot in a village near Dindigul where it really did not have a school. The nearest school to that village is about two or three kilometres away. And I wanted to show a village which really did not have a school.''

Would she and the audiences have been happier if she had ended the film differently? ``This ending came about because of a piece of statistics. The book doesn't have a climax. We felt it could not end like that. If you end the film on a happy note the audience is going to forget all about it. Now I don't want this to be a film which the audience sees and forgets. It shouldn't allow them to rest in peace.

I believe that cinema must inspire - What is the point in making films, which have no impact? But I have nothing against people who make cinema, which entertains. But for me my work would have to make people think and react.''

Considering the fact that this is her first film one was struck by the confidence with which the film moved.

``I had a very good team put together since it is a first time effort on my part. And as you know cinema is a collective effort. Let me also say that I am pretty confident that it is going to be commercially viable too. Because the audience, is not very different from you and me and the five or six hundred odd people who have seen it. And it has had a tremendous impact on every individual who has seen it so far.''

Janaki is planning a July release because there are processes which need to be set in motion, ``The theatre, publicity, the rigmarole. One needs to go through all that.'' The film has also been put through test marketing with a booklet that gives the feedback from those who have already seen the film.

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