Enough Is Enough

The #MeToo movement swept through India last year and its ripples are still being felt. Meet the Women in Cinema Collective, who are fighting the good fight within the Malayalam film industry.

- Manju Sara Rajan

Rima Kallingal wasn’t in Kochi when she heard it on the news. A close friend and colleague from the Malayalam film industry was abducted from her car while travelling from a shoot location on a late evening. She was assaulted for more than two hours in a moving vehicle. The perpetrators filmed whatever took place on a phone camera before they abandoned her and fled. On returning to Kerala’s film capital, actor-producer Kallingal went to her house while she’d gone to meet the Director General of Police. She sat with the survivor’s mother as the television replayed the news. “We didn’t know what to tell each other. We were sitting numb. And then there was a ticker on a Malayalam channel: ‘What was the relationship between the actress and the driver?’” Kallingal says she felt rage at the insinuation that there was a backstory to the incident. As an actor and a vocal feminist in a fairly conservative society, slights were a part of life, but the odious tone of this reportage felt like a violation.

There was no avenue or representative body to protest misogyny. So, within weeks of the attack, a group of women creatives from across the Malayalam film industry, including Kallingal, actors Parvathy Thiruvothu, Geetu Mohandas, Padmapriya Janakiraman and Revathi, director Anjali Menon, editor Beena Paul and others formed a representation and lobby group called Women in Cinema Collective (WCC). It was unprecedented, not just in films but also in relation to any professional segment anywhere in this country.