Women in Cinema Collective, the organisation that rose to fight gender bias in Malayalam cinema, has launched a year-long series of events to celebrate its first anniversary.

The event-series, in WCC’s words, aims to “create awareness and generate institutional support for gender equality in cinema, address attitudes towards traditional gender norms and build a pathway towards an inclusive workspace.”

A curtain-raiser event titled ‘Punarvaayana’, which will officially launch the year-long series will be held in Calicut, Cochin and Thiruvananthapuram on the 26, 27 and 28th of this month.  The curtain-raiser will see prominent women from various fields — including mediapersons, lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, social activists etc —  participating in the event.

The Collective plans to hold its first event in August. The series will address issues such as exclusionary workspaces, exploitation and gender discrimination. The series will also reinforce the ideologies of the collective by conducting programmes every quarter of the year.

The collective also plans to include consensus-building workshops with film trade associations, networking and rights awareness workshops for the film fraternity, write-shops, panel discussions etc. It will also include activities focused on the media, youth and women, which will be seen through a prism of gender equality through art events and uniquely curated public engagements. It will also celebrate the role of women in cinema by holding exhibitions and announcing end-of-year awards for Malayalam movies that pass to the Bechdel Test – which is used to gauge how women are being represented in literature