UNLIMITED GIRLS
Directed by Paromita Vora
Produced by Sakshi
94 mins, English and Hindi with English sub-titles, 2002

A film that centres around a chat room filled with the voices of older Indian feminists and younger urban women searching the ideologies of feminism to find a room of their own

Screened as part of Vikalp: Films for Freedom organised by OPEN SPACE in Pune, July 31 - August 29, 2004

Paromita Vora’s new film examines definitions of feminism and explores the many feminist identities that we provide for ourselves and for others. The Big Questions and the Big Issues are all there, turned over and around and under, through encounters with women, old and young, who are the “movement” in the most open sense of the word. These encounters are bracketed by conversations in a chat room inhabited by the likes of Anarchist Ann, Marxist Usha, Chamki Girl, Atilla the Nun, Fearless and Devi as Diva (among others) who create a spectrum of voices and concerns and confusions.

The characterisation of these disembodied voices and the choice of names is quite wonderful. Fearless is the late entrant into the chat room and despite her name, actually has reservations and trepidation. She strikes up a special relationship with Chamki, one of the gentler voices, and it is the questions and interventions of these two characters that really drive the discussions in the room. Fearless is the one that roams the streets, meeting women (including a delightful encounter with Mumbai’s only woman cab driver), excavating positions, definitions, perspectives and prejudices. Even as she brings the doubts and confusions of her real-life encounters into the chat room, Fearless is papering a wall in her “real” room with all that she finds – pamphlets, posters, reading materials – reflecting the plurality of a movement that includes rather than excludes.

The film has a refreshing, contemporary, urban feel to it. Not only is it located in the metropolises, the intelligent use of the means and modes of contemporary culture bring life and vigour to the film. Vora uses animation, dramatisations and conversations to explore her theses, but the vibrating centre of the film remains the “room full of voices” and the “history of conversations” among the women in the chat room. The many voices in the film, embodied and disembodied, share experience, knowledge, pain, longing and despite difference, reinforce sisterhood.

While Unlimited Girls strikes a very “here and now” note, Vora is conscientious about history and the past, about how the movement came to encompass so many colours, so many lenses and so many perspectives. In that sense, the film is as much about our inheritance as it is about our inheritors. One of the wonderful dynamics in the film is that between the voices of women who have been part of the movement for decades (Urvashi Butalia, Vina Mazumdar, Meena Menon, Sonal Shukla, Satyarani Chaddha, Shahjehan Begum, to name but a few) and the voices of younger urban women who search the ideologies of feminism to find a room of their own, preferably one with a view. Older and younger feminists never interact face to face in the film, but their voices weave in and out of each other’s, creating harmonies and disharmonies that tell us where the movement has come and what it has enabled.

In many ways, Unlimited Girls itself stands as the inheritor of a long and vociferous tradition of feminist documentary filmmaking in India . Women have been making political films in India since the 1970s but the real flowering of the phenomenon was in the 1980s. Sadly, the impetus for the hundred flowers to bloom in this arena were the increasing atrocities against women (sati, bride burning, the Shah Bano case), systemic as well as personal. Even as Vora’s film explores the Big Issues and makes reference to all that has galvanised us over the decades, it is also an extremely personal journey for the filmmaker. The film is driven as much by her quest for personal answers as it is by the issues of the movement and the positions and experiences of the women around her. Vora skillfully avoids editorialising in her own voice, as the chat room conversations take over that role.

Another major achievement of the film is that it ends with a blank slate, one that we are free to write upon as we begin or continue our own journey along those paths that have been walked before. Nearly 25 five years after the Mathura Rape Case which concretised the Indian women’s movement, it is time, indeed, for introspection and self-examination. Unlimited Girls gives us all an opportunity to do that.

For more information contact : parodevi@vsnl.com
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