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Day 4 : 28 September 2008

- Clara Presler, America India Foundation

On the final day of the Development Film Festival, it started with special screening of a film “Cinnapillaiamma”. It showed the real life story of a woman who revolutionized the life of many women with the Self Help Groups and motivate them to save and take loans for entrepreneurship activities. She was recognizes and awarded and she still lives a life of serving many poor around her.

Another film was shown that again explored the impossibility of forcefully removing someone’s identity. The topic in this situation, however, did not only explore local implications. It is a topic of great concern worldwide: the discrimination against and the adversity facing transgender people in society. “Missing Colors” followed the life of Karthi, a transgender woman artist who led a life of great struggle. Banished from her home as a young boy, she was forced to find her own way with the companionship and acceptance of just one other transgender, Mallika. Again and again, the film suggested that, were Karthi not transgender, her art would support her. As it is, she is forced to sell herself to make a living. When she is criticized for spending her money all on paints, she replies, “I am selling my body, but I cannot sell my mind”. Her art provides a refuge for her painful memories.

The film follows a parallel story of a researcher who is studying transgenderism and seeks out Karthi as a subject of her story. Interestingly, the journalist’s companion takes some convincing of the equal rights of transgendered people. The journalist points out those parents do not reject their children if they are disabled. Instead they nurture them with love and care. Transgendered people deserve the same love and care of any other child and their identity should not be suppressed.

The film ends artfully with Karthi’s final colors. Despairing of her future, she sits on the ground near a road, looking in the mirror. Her mind passes over her troubled past. She paints a third eye on her forehead and finds peace. Shortly thereafter, the photojournalist stumbles upon her. Karthi had been worried that when she died no one would be there to collect her body. As it turned out, her life and death would be memorialized in the journalists’ work.

Mr.Paramasivam, who acted as a transgender was on the stage to express his views about the film. Many of the audience gave their comments. There was a formal valedictory ceremony and it was a good experience of viewing development films