On January 25, 2000 I received an email about
a young woman at a university in the South Indian state of Kerala.
She and her girlfriend had fled the school, presumably under the threat
of expulsion as a result of the rumors of their love affair with each
other. The women were recovered and sent back to their respective
families. The next day, one of the young women’s body was found
floating in the reservoir of a dam. It was a tragic loss of young
life and potential, a suicide. It was, I would learn, an all too familiar
circumstance in the South Indian state of Kerala.
The story of the two Kerala university students bore a striking
resemblance to the fictional back-story of my second short film,
“Uli.” I wanted to do something to draw attention to
the alarmingly frequent incidents of gay suicide—to try to
stem that tide; I knew that isolation was a factor in these incidents,
so I considered creating a positive media representation of young
gay people. I began writing the story of two young Indian women
in love, this time as a feature length film.
In the summer of 2002, my seventh year as a public interest lawyer,
I was awarded national Sunshine Peace Award, for my work in women’s
issues. That recognition came with a substantial cash award. That
award offered the seed money to begin work on the film that I had
been wrangling with for two years. I saw the film as another means
of effecting social service.
I spent eight months in India, working on other friends’
films, writing my script and exploring the feasibility of making
my own feature film. I returned to Chicago for a few months to complete
my script, meanwhile mobilizing the elements for a film shoot in
Kerala. In October 2003 I arrived once again in India, this time
with the script for a feature length film.
On the night of January 26, 2004, exactly four years from the date
I received that email about the drowned young woman, and nearly
seven years after the making of my film short, “Uli,”
I arrived in Ottapallam, Kerala to make the feature film, Sancharram.
|