Miriam Chandy Menacherry

Miriam Chandy Menacherry is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Mumbai. She has grown up watching Malayalam films and has been following the gender wars that are redefining contemporary cinema in Kerala, her home state.

This grant will enable Miriam to explore and compile the personal stories of a tenacious group of women producers, directors, writers and film technicians working in the Malayalam film industry in Kerala that is dominated by men. The project will construct vivid and contrasting accounts of the Women in Cinema Collective as they defiantly challenge the rules of commercial cinema in the state.

Considered a progressive state that spawned many social reform movements and bolstered by high social indices of education and health, Kerala has lagged in gender equations according to Miriam. The women empowerment script ends with the stale narrative that a girl born in Kerala can dream of a future with good education and health. Popular cinema of the state gives a glimpse into the hierarchies and patriarchal norms that reinforce rigid stereotypes to ensure women are seen but not heard. In this way, their contributions have been erased or marginalised. The Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) challenges the discrimination and the hierarchies in the Malayali film industry of Kerala - Mollywood. The collective was formed when a popular actress was subjected to a sexual assault by a person from within the industry in 2017. Since then it has challenged the prevalent gender dynamics in the industry. Miriam likens the collective spirit of the group to the political movements in the state. She will study the motivations and goals of WCC alongside the sociopolitical climate that has enable this watershed movement in the state.

Miriam will revisit the history of Malayalam cinema to retrieve the contributions of women and the evolution of feminist standpoints that led to the creation of WCC. She will examine a select set of films, interview film historians, journalists, access archival and published material to reconstruct the different chapters of Mollywood and the role women played in its shaping. She will also speak to the women who have been associated with Malayalam cinema in different capacities and have created a niche for themselves despite the odds. She will study the individual contributions of women scriptwriters, technicians, producers and directors from different eras of Mollywood, who played key roles in creating a space for women from the studio era to the present.

One of the aims of this project is to study the emergence of the Women in Cinema Collective and the precedent it sets in expanding roles for women in cinema construction. Through anecdotes, stories and images of women at work, Miriam will capture the ripple effect the movement has caused in Mollywood and other regional and national film industries in India.

The outcome of this project will be a manuscript for a book and an installation. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the manuscript and audiovisual documentation generated during the fieldwork.