Film Screening

This film tells the tale of an adolescent girl who grew up in an “unseeable” Dalit caste group in southern India whose forced occupation is to wash clothes of other Dalits, the dead, and menstruating women.  She transcends her lot and becomes immortalized as their local deity, Maadathy.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, Leena Manimekalai, a leading Tamil poet and award-winning filmmaker. With a strong repertoire of films with an impressive exhibition record covering over 100 international film festivals, she is an interventionist, and her forte is participatory filmmaking. Her tryst with censorship, both constitutional and extra constitutional, as a brown queer female body, as a poet, and as a politically unapologetic filmmaker is itself a metanarrative in her journey as an artist. She has an M.F.A. in film from York University and is currently teaching undergraduate students in the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto, Mississauga.

Co-sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center and Yale MacMillan South Asian Studies Council