The trailer of Leena Manimekalai's feature film 'Maadathy: An Unfairy Tale' dropped on YouTube before releasing on popular OTT platform Neestream on June 24. The critically-acclaimed film's trailer was shared by South Chennai MP Thamizhachi Thangapandian, Actress Aishwarya Rajesh, Rapper Arivu and others. They also extended their wishes to the team for its successful release.
Talking about how the seeds of the movie were sown, Filmmaker Leena Manimekalai says, "I was researching for another documentary feature while I came across an article that said that there is a community called Puthirai Vannar who are treated as "unseeable". This community of people are Dalits within Dalits. They wash the clothes of Dalits, menstruating women and the dead. It is a forced occupation and the mere sight of them is considered as "pollution".
Leena says that extensive research went into making the film and notes that she went and met many such people from the community. "There are one or two families who are from this community in every village. They are hired per hundred families to wash their clothes. Research articles say that there are 1,00,000 families across Tamil Nadu."
Having grown up in the Western Ghats, Leena has listened to folklore and has worshipped Gods like Mariaamman, Ellaiamman and many others. "Meeting these families, I felt their existence was tragic. Although there is transition and change, it is very slow. Their life story pushed me to write this," she says.
Three to four drafts and multiple rehearsals later, the story was born, she says. "It was made on a shoestring budget and 95 per cent of the cast was from the villages. We wrote the dialogues but with every rehearsals, we improved and changed when the inputs came. I had to do location recording and it is a community participatory film."
"I wanted this film to release in theatres, because I spent a lot of time in post-production and make it perfect for theatrical release, but it wasn't possible," she adds.
But being an independent filmmaker, especially a woman, has it always been difficult to make a film? Leena answers, "Film is my expression. I always wanted to be an author and a director. So, I constantly worked towards it. It is difficult to be an independent filmmaker, because you keep questioning the status quo and are challenging everything. You are alone, but I like it as this is what I wanted to do in life."
Elaborating, she adds, "I don't belong here. I exist here but I don't belong to the mainstream industry as such. I make films which I believe in. The industry is patriarchal, feudal and casteist. To smash that, I take one brick off that. I want others to take many such bricks and smash it."
The film has been screened at several national and international film festivals so far, including Busan International Film Festival where the world premiere took place in 2019, Third Eye Asian Film Festival and Chicago South Asian Film Festival.
Take a look at the trailer of the film here: