A dozen Indians walked out of the screening of Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women at the ongoing Toronto International Film Festival 2003. They claimed Manish Jha was selling exaggerated lies about India to the West.
At an interview following the film, Jha, 25, received many harsh words for his film about female infanticide and dowry deaths. But not before the film received warm applause.
"I was very, very scared by the hostile reaction," Jha said on Thursday, September 11. "The few people who walked out made so much noise it looked like hundreds were walking out."
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At another screening in Toronto two years ago, a handful of desis protested against Digvijay Singh's Maya in which girls in a small Andhra Pradesh village are traditionally made to sleep with the temple priests soon after they come of age.
Many people said the film did not reflect the reality in India and that Singh's claims that the film was based on real incidents were false. But a Dalit stood up during the commotion and started quoting selected injunctions from the scriptures about women.
The protestors said he too was distorting reality and the scriptures.
Jha, who made his feature film debut with Matrubhoomi, came to Toronto soon after the film received the International Federation of Film Critics prize at the Venice Film Festival.
"Some people in India and abroad are in denial of the reality that infanticide and dowry deaths continue to happen every day in India," he said. "Ours is a great country, ours is a great civilisation. Yet, these things happen too."
The Indo-French co-production takes an 'extreme leap' of imagination to wonder what could happen if women, because of systematic oppression and killings, do not exist in the country, he said.
He said he made the film as a tribute to his unschooled mother.
"My father, because of the nature of his job, was always travelling. It was my mother who kept the family together," he said. "Inside the house, she was the queen," he continued, "but outside, she did not get the respect she deserved."
"I made this film based on my deep convictions," he added. "It was meant to start a discussion about how and why we
still continue mistreating our women, especially given the fact that we are taught to worship women as goddesses. In systematically ill-treating women, men are debasing themselves."
In Venice, the movie received a 12-minute-long standing ovation, he said.
Jha, who has never been to a film school, is self-taught. His first foray into cinema was with the short film A Very
Very Silent Film which won a jury award at Cannes.
"People take you seriously when you receive an award at an international film festival," he said, explaining how he
raised $500,000 for the feature. "About half of it came from an Indian movie producer and the rest from a French film company," he said.
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