Set in Tamilnadu, India, ‘Our Family’ brings together excerpts from Nirvanam, a one person performance, by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and a family of three generations of trans-gendered female subjects. Aasha, Seetha and Dhana, who are bound together by ties of adoption, belong to the community called Aravanis (aka Hijras, in some parts of India). Aasha Bharathi, the grandmother, is the president of the Tamilnadu Aravanigal Association, Chennai. Seetha, the daughter lives with her male partner Selvam, in Coimbatore. Dhana, Seetha’s adopted daughter also lives with her and shuttles between her adopted and her natal families.
She Write
Dir: Anjali Monteiro & KP Jayasankar; 55 min; Tamil with Eng.subtitles; 2005
SheWrite weaves together the narratives and work of four Tamil women poets. Salma negotiates subversive expression within the tightly circumscribed space allotted to a woman in a small town. For Kuttirevathi, solitude is a crucial creative space from where her work resonates. Her anthology entitled Breasts (2003) elicited hate mail, obscene calls and threats.
The fact that women poets are exploring themes such as desire and sexuality been opposed by some Tamil film lyricists, who have gone on record with threats of death and violence. This has been resisted by a collective of poets and artists called Anangu (Woman). Malathy Maitri is a founder member of Anangu. Her poems explore feminine power and spaces. Sukirtharani writes of desire and longing, celebrating the body and feminine empowerment.
The film traverses these diverse modes of resistance, through images and sounds that evoke the universal experiences of pain, anger, desire and transcendence.
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