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An eight-minute Indian film on the horror of acid attacks, Newborns, was among the more talked-about titles screened in the inaugural International Short Cuts section of the 39th Toronto International Film Festival. Made by 31-year-old screenwriter-director Megha Ramaswamy, this was only a teaser cut of what will eventually be an 80-minute documentary. But it provided an intriguing foretaste of a refreshingly novel and stylised approach to a dark, disturbing theme. Newborns focuses on victims of acid attacks — Ramaswamy calls them survivors — as they look forward and gaze back after the brutality that changed their lives.
She infuses her experimental style with poetry and myth. The obvious intention is to make Newborns a film essentially about regeneration. Newborns deals with "fighters", tenacious women, who have survived the worst of Indian patriarchy and found ways to fight back against perpetrators of acid attacks. "The film’s title is self-explanatory," says Ramaswamy, who co-wrote the screenplay of Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitaan. "Newborns is about renewal." The idea behind the film, she suggests, is to break down the barriers and strike at the very root of societal prejudices that prevent survivors from returning to the mainstream. Ramaswamy took up the cause a little over a year ago when she began working with the NGO Chhanv, which is run by former journalist Alok Dixit. It spearheads the nationwide Stop Acid Attacks campaign. The version of Newborns that Toronto audiences saw in the second week of September was filmed in Delhi, but its setting is indeterminate. The film plays out in a dystopian space where masculine brutality knows no bounds. "The urge to cause the kind of narcissistic injury that cannot be reversed seems to be embedded in the psyche of the Indian male," says Ramaswamy. She turns a terrifying truth into an evocative tale of an elephant, wolves and lambs. Each creature has eyes of a distinct colour. The elephant, representative of society, has eyes as black as the rain clouds. But when the red-eyed wolf attacks the lamb (which has serene blue eyes), the elephant looks away. Newborns alludes to Rashmi, a girl "who has lost at least one shoe in every village" and to an elephant that one day brings the shoe home. So is Rashmi ready to step out of her corner again and reclaim the place that has been snatched away from her? In the course of a trip in a dimly-lit bus, Laxmi, one of India’s best known "acid attack fighters", communicates via a voiceover and tells a clown: "We have memorable faces." That statement of fierce intent sets her apart from those that might cower and hide in the shadows. But the worrying question is: is the person sitting behind her in the moving bus a kindred spirit or just another wolf with a clown’s visage? It’s unsettling. Ramaswamy, who grew up in Delhi and Pune, arrived in Mumbai after a one-year course in film writing at the Film and Television Institute of India. She was quick to infer from her early experiences in the industry that romantic dramas and gangster flicks were not her cup of tea. So here she is, telling stories that nobody else will. "As filmmakers, we have to set higher standards for ourselves and not perpetuate regressive images that encourage gender violence," says Ramaswamy. She reveals that many acclaimed Mumbai screenwriters have advised her not to mix her profession with the causes she espouses. Newborns is happy evidence that she is determined not to budge.
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"I eschewed a
direct, journalistic take on the subject because I wasn’t interested
in generating any kind of sensationalism," says the Mumbai-based
Ramaswamy. "Moreover," she adds, "reportage on acid
attacks has been done to death."