BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

In order to locate and contextualise the space women filmmakers occupy in what I refer to as New Pakistani Cinema (NPC), this article highlights the eight women directors of NPC, whose films were released between 2013 and 2018: Afia Nathaniel, Iram Parveen Bilal, Meenu Gaur, Mehreen Jabbar, Momina Duraid, Sabiha Sumar, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Shazia Ali Khan. In doing so, this article also touches upon women working behind the scenes as producers and writers (often in multiple roles on the same film as director, producer and/or writer) to illustrate how women filmmakers have played a key role in establishing NPC in its early years. Starting with initial releases in 2013, NPC functions within a complex terrain, informed in part by new industry players, the crossing of borders in the production of films, the role of foreign content in Pakistani cinemas and an engagement with regional and global themes situated within a local context. Therefore, NPC and the evolving cinema culture that surrounds it demand unique and innovative forms and avenues of production, distribution and exhibition, along with distinct emerging imaginaries that are an amalgamation of the local, national, regional and global. It is within the temporal and spatial intersections of these different processes that we can begin to situate these women filmmakers.

Since its inception at the Bath Film Festival 2014, the ‘F-Rating’ has been adopted as a yardstick to foster equitable representation of women in film. The rise of a new sub-genre of Hindi ‘Indie’ cinema (Devasundaram, 2016, 2018) has been augmented by an array of bona fide Female-rated independent films. These films fulfil the triune criteria for F-Rating, featuring women both behind and in front of the camera – as directors, actors and scriptwriters. I argue that these distinct female voices in new independent Hindi cinema have engendered discursive filmic spaces of resistance – alternative articulations that transgress India’s patriarchal national master narrative. Indian cinema thus far has been presided over by Bollywood’s hegemonic bastion of male-dominated discourses. The mainstream industry continues to propagate gender-based wage disparity and hypersexualised representations of the female body via the serialised song and dance spectacle of the ‘item number’. The increasing presence of F-Rated Hindi films on the international film festival circuit and through wider releases, gestures towards these films’ melding of the global and local. Drawing on my curation work with the UK Asian Film Festival (UKAFF) and discursive analyses of seminal F-Rated films, this essay highlights the pivotal role played by F-Rated Hindi Indie films in opening up transdiscursive dimensions and creating national and global conversations around issues of gender inequities in India.

This article examines women directors in Malayalam cinema as historical subjects, looking at the manner in which they place themselves within Kerala’s cultural semiotics and its popular imaginary, disrupting or legitimising an illusion coded to the measure of gender desires and differences within its semiosphere. The logic of commercial cinema demands that women directors fall in sync with the representative politics of the male gaze and a capitalist libidinal economy, seducing women into passive codes of femininity and aligning men within the registers of a hegemonic masculinity, in effect foreclosing the play of alternative languages of desire. Malayalam cinema has had two kinds of women directors, one who tries to puncture this logic from within the male bastions of popular cinema, and the second who strives to be an ‘other’ to the mythmakers of the phallic order. The article attempts to read the first mode of intervention using the Marxian specular metaphor of the camera obscura as a hierarchical apparatus of ideological inversion where the real is substituted by a spectacle of the illusory. To analyse the latter, the article puts forward the metaphor of camera dentata – that modus of representation which seeks to topple the patriarchal and capitalist ideological predispositions of the cinematic apparatus, thus rendering it capable of diminishing the power of phallic signifiers and ‘the moral panics of sexuality’ they engender.

This visual essay focuses on contemporary women’s cinema in Afghanistan, which started in 2001, when, for the first time, women made films in Afghanistan. They narrate stories from their perspectives, and choose different filmic means, characters and genres to tell their stories. With a selection of film stills and photographs, this visual essay introduces the work of these women filmmakers. The images are accompanied by text that describes the contents and the making of their films. Text includes quotations from filmmakers reflecting on their practice. The directors whose work I present are, among others, Roya Sadat, Saba Sahar, Diana Saqeb and Aiqela Rezaie. As some of the filmmakers also work as actresses, I draw an arc into the changeful history of Afghan cinema and the role women played as actresses in these films. The essay highlights the period between 2002 and 2009, when I worked in Kabul making my film Passing the Rainbow and co-organising the film festival SPLICE IN on Gender and Society.

Existing accounts of Myanmar’s film industry available to English speakers are more than twenty years out of date. Opening with a brief overview of cinema in Myanmar since 2000, this article is based on a recent visit to the Myanmar Motion Picture Development Department and the Yangon Film School, on conversations with staff, students and alumnae of these institutions and of the National University of Arts and Culture, and with local independent filmmakers. The purpose of my visit was to begin the groundwork needed to answer basic questions: Who are the women making films in Myanmar today? Where are they trained? What are the conditions in which they work? What kind of films they make? How do they fund production? How do their films circulate? And finally: Is there a women’s cinema in Myanmar? What follows thus outlines the context in which women in Myanmar make films today and introduces the work of a small number of them. I conclude with reflections on three short films: A Million Threads (2006, by Thu Thu Shein), Now I am 13 (2013, by Shin Daewe), and Seeds of Sadness (2018, by Thae Zar Chi Khaing), two of which can be found online (at http://yangonfilmschool.org/___-free-yfs-film/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX0LUZQcMCQ).

S. A. Chatterji, Filming Reality: The Independent Documentary Movement in India. SAGE Publications, 2015, 320 pp., $59.99.

K. P. Jayasankar & A. Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India. SAGE Publications, 2016, 276 pp., $54.99.

A. Sharma, Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, XIII, 276 pp., 41.59€.

Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War. Duke University Press, 2019, 352 pp., $28.95. ISBN: 9781478004011.