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The banalties of hostel rooms, the remnants of laughter after a joke has been forgotten, the humiliation of being harassed, the loneliness of movie nights. All these memories of days spent at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, floated into the minds of women alumni as a digital project brought them together.
The hostel that housed them has now been demolished but some of these memories found their way into beautiful short films they crafted. Thirteen of those films have been travelling across India, and reached Kerala this week for the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) held in Thiruvananthapuram.
The project that brought them together had a curious title: A Room of Our Own – a digital art and memory project that records the gendered experience of being women students who remain a minority within the student body. Less than 10% of the alumni are women in FTII's 65 years.
The idea was born of the imagination of three women alumni – Surabhi Sharma, Bina Paul and Reena Mohan – who set out to document the stories and works of every woman who has crossed the gates of the institute.
Surabhi, Beena and Reena, all well known names in cinema, leveraged all their contacts and spent several weeks reaching out to these women.
Interviews of nearly 60 of the 600 odd women alumni have been recorded as part of the project, which also collected materials including photographs. Some of the women soon began making short films which reflected on their time at the FTII.
The films shine light on the talented women and are filled with captivating photographs of an earlier time, adorable snippets of hostel conversations, poetic narrations or artful visuals, all of them capturing emotions of love and sorrow. The youngest of the filmmakers, who are being showcased as part of the project, is Prachee Bajania while Parvathi Menon, the first female graduate of FTII, is the oldest.
Making these films was one way to show they could not be erased. The alma mater had apparently forgotten them, when it brought out a coffee table book of its great alumni, featuring mostly the male graduates and only a sprinkling of women. It seemed in line with the prejudices they had borne through the decades, and sadly, like proof that little had changed.
A Room of Our Own, named after a phenomenal essay by Virginia Woolf, is an attempt to fix that. Virginia Woolf’s prompt for women to have a room of their own if they are to create fiction, became for the FTII’s women alumni, the idea of a space of their own.
At its core, the project is a documentation of a film history, largely forgotten or neglected. The FTII was founded in 1960, thirteen years after India won its independence, and in all these years, women have accounted for only a small percentage of the students. The number of women in technical areas other than acting rose from nearly zero in the early years, but not by much.
“Imagine the extraordinary vision that must have gone into starting a film school in 1960, when the country was still so young,” says Surabhi Sharma, sipping her evening tea at the Kairali theatre, venue of the IDSFFK. A day earlier, she presented the project at the IDSFFK along with FTII graduates and filmmakers Prachi and Lipika. On the same day, Reena Mohan presented the project to an audience in Korea.
Surabhi talks little about herself – nothing about her work as a documentary filmmaker, or as an academic teaching at the New York University in Abu Dhabi. But she mentions getting a grant for the project from the University.
“I don't remember who it was that called me, Reena or Bina. Although they wouldn't agree, I think of both of them as my mentors. They are my friends, yes, but also people I am always in awe of. So when they called, I said of course, I will be in the project,” Surabhi says. Reena and Bina are both National Award winners, one for documentary filmmaking, the other for editing. Bina is also known for putting together the International Film Festival of Kerala for most of its 29 editions.
But none of them became part of the FTII’s coffee table book that featured its alumni who have won National Awards or else made blockbuster movies. What kind of film history will you preserve in this manner, Surabhi asks. Their project is a counter to that, documenting the stories of many women who studied at the FTII. They intend to continue the process of interviews so that they can include more women as they go along.
In the beginning the idea was vague. All that they knew was that they would reach out to the women alumni and take interviews. The original idea was to hold an exhibition, but the pandemic struck in 2020 and put an end to that. The interviews did not halt, they were done over Zoom calls, and it struck them that this could be a digital project – a website documenting their history.
“Just before this, our hostel warden – who had worked from 1980 to 2012 – formed a Whatsapp group with all the generations of students she had kept in touch with, to let us know of the hostel’s demolition. Memories began pouring in, about the rooms, nostalgic messages about the colours of the curtains and what they kept there. For many it was the first time they had a room of their own. But on the third or fourth day, someone spoke about the unpleasant memories at FTII, and then a lot of others followed,” Surabhi says.
The conversations, along with the disappointment over the coffee table book, led to the project. Surabhi, Bina and Reena, created 35 questions and used them to draw out wonderful experiences, surprising themselves. The website defied conventional design, did not become a directory of who’s who. But they were all connected by seven prompts : journey to the FTII, experience of the classroom, experience of the hostel, of solidarities, of the campus, of the journey after film school, of forming relationships with art and cinema.
The bringing together of generations – a happy occasion – also brought out hard truths. Little has changed. At interviews, women are still asked if they were wasting a seat. Surabhi says some see it as a preparation for going to work in a male dominated industry. But even if they got out and proved their worth over and over again, there would be little recognition coming from the industry or the alma mater.
In their journeys with the project, Surabhi, Bina and Reena realised that this was not limited to the FTII, even in universities containing a large number of women, the experiences became relatable.
“We realised that unless we record it, both the celebration of the fact that women were there and what were the difficulties, no one else is going to write this, no one cares,” Surabhi says.
So, they did it.