Propped up on a boat resting on the shore, looking out at the evening sea, Leela and Mohana eat their meals and joke about fish. “I have older fish because I am older and you have young fish because you are younger,” Leela, adorable and funny as she is with Mohana, says, laughing. Two auto-rickshaw drivers relaxing at the end of a working day is how Auto Queens, a documentary on the camaraderie and struggles of a group of women workers in Chennai, begins. The film, made by cinematographer-director Sraiyanti, was screened at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala on September 26.
“The idea came to me from a friend, Mathivannan, who is one of the producers. Their company was doing some work with Veera Pengal Munnetra Sangam (VPMS), the women-led auto rickshaw and transport workers union in Chennai,” Sraiyanti says.
The VPMS began as a Whatsapp group in 2018 to address the many issues faced by women rickshaw drivers, including a lack of parking space. It was later registered in 2024. Mohana and Leela, who lead the organisation, are also thick friends, having serious conversations about the issues faced by women drivers at one moment and pulling each other’s legs at another. Sraiyanti manages to capture a beautiful balance between the two parallel stories, with the free and uninhibited conversations of women, when they come together, becoming both endearing and inspiring.
Scenes of the union’s gathering in a room are full of surprising candour and humour. Their simple and straightforward answers to problems at work and home are so wonderfully articulate that after watching it, you might just want to run to your own group of women friends, close the door, and simply unwind. “The amount of power the women feel when they are together, you can sense it in the room. There is no holding back – how women are when we are together versus when we have to have walls up for the outside world, you can see those walls breaking inside the union office,” Sraiyanti says.
She has not given them a script or asked them to do anything specific, she simply put them in favourable situations, like the beach where Mohana and Leela converse. Quite by chance, though, she manages to shoot an argument that the short-tempered Leela has with a male driver who asks her to move her vehicle. Mohana later tells her to show some patience, even as she, too, asserts that no woman needs to hold back when she is treated unfairly.
Adding to the emotion that comes from the women’s easy camaraderie is the music – old Tamil songs like ‘Aayirathil Oruthi Amma’ and ‘Paadatha paatellam’ – that flows into the screen with such perfect timing. It is lovely to see the women enjoy their time, listening to their favourite songs and singing along, even as Mohana jokes that Leela’s partner left her because of her singing.
The film, at less than half an hour, seems to end all too soon, and Sraiyanti has been told by many women that they wanted to continue watching this story. The women in the VPMS union who appear in the film watched it together at a screening and were quite emotional about how it turned out, Sraiyanti says. Their fight continues, and membership has more than doubled in the years since. Sraiyanti approaches the film both as a gender rights issue as well as a portrayal of community support. “We cannot not address the gender issue but the bigger thing for me through the film was to show how, having such community support, having people backing you, gives you strength as an individual struggling to make a living.”
Sraiyanti, too, has worked her way up to directing her first documentary independently. She has been a cinematographer for the past 10 years. She began with documentaries, shooting films with Premkrishna Akkattu, who shot Auto Queens. Later, they became cinematographers on feature films such as Sai Pallavi’s Gargi and the Malayalam film Detective Ujjwalan. However, she says, her interest has always been in non-fiction films. Before Auto Queens, Sraiyanti and Prem made a short film called Tambaram Cooking, which also premiered at the IDSFFK a few years ago.