Meet the people behind first Indian VR film at Cannes

Brut India

From shame to empowerment, Poulomi Basu’s work tells the powerful story of a South Asian girl's awakening through her first period, breaking taboos and redefining the superhero genre.

Transcript

00:00Maya really is a journey, you know, from shame to empowerment and healing.

00:17It's an absolute honor to bring such a subversive piece of work that is Maya

00:24the Birth of a Superhero at Cannes. We feel that if there was any place in the world for a film

00:28festival for this to be, it had to be Cannes.

00:43For us, it was a very specific decision to make them in virtual reality because it's a

00:48work of embodiment and so the audience is embodied in the piece, so they're actually

00:54an active participant in the piece, so their behavior and their sort of adventure kind of

01:00within the piece controls the piece. So the embodiment was important for us to understand

01:06and make people feel what it is to have periods if you've never had periods and if you've had

01:10them before, what it is to go through this psychological journey of shame and empowerment.

01:15Maya the Birth of a Superhero is about a South Asian girl's awakening of her sexuality with

01:26the initiation of a first period and how she sort of decolonizes the superhero

01:31sort of genre and character and battles taboos and misogyny in a western society.

01:36Maya is amazing because it kind of plays into the sort of the inner sort of erotica, the desires

01:43and the amazing sort of magic of menstruation and the power of periods that is somehow

01:50has always been, you know, seen as something that is subjugated and repressed and suppressed

01:55and oppressed in our societies, not just in South Asia, in the global South, but also in the West.

02:01A desire to kind of create, you know, impact and conversation about, you know, about how the

02:11issue around menstruation or is stigma and taboo in almost every society. And we use a superhero

02:18from, you know, from India to unlock those things, that stigma and taboo which is often hidden

02:27in plain sight in Western countries.

02:29The normalization of violence against marginalized women, by marginalized I mean like those whose

02:42voices are deliberately silenced. I have to make it very clear that nobody is actually marginalized,

02:47you know, but people deliberately deliberately silence women, they deliberately silence oppressed

02:51voices, you know. I think that's evident everywhere in every culture, in every country, when you start

02:56to dig beneath the surface. I think partly that's the point of the piece. The point of the piece is

03:01that, you know, Western cultures and Western countries tend to think themselves as kind of

03:07having like elevated and a kind of higher morality and, you know, things, relationships, you know,

03:14are more equal and there is no such thing as stigma and shame. And I think that's, you know,

03:20that's not the case when you really, when there is a myth of itself, when you start to look at it.

03:26So I think that, you know, as someone who, you know, comes from a kind of, you know, working

03:32class background who doesn't have all the, you know, you recognize the patterns and the tropes

03:39of kind of marginalization and I guess, you know, your role then is to support and amplify those

03:46stories and voices and make sure these things remain questioned and then, you know, I mean the

03:53role of, you know, to interrogate oneness, interrogate taboo and to interrogate systems

03:59of power, hierarchies, to use the medium in a way which is both, you know, fun and engaging

04:08to engage an audience in a kind of, in a story that touches every life and every person.

04:16My journey is very special and unique to my own sort of life because, you know, I grew up in

04:25Kolkata where my mother and grandmother, they were both very young child brides, you know,

04:30and then they became very young widows and they continued to live a life of restrictions,

04:34oppressions, education wasn't allowed to them. And my mother asked me to leave home very early

04:40so I would have access to the dreams and choices that were not allowed to generations of women in

04:45my family, you know. So, for me, obviously, all of my work is driven by my own personal lived

04:51experience and my own positionality in sort of driving these narratives forward, you know, about

04:58sort of women's adventures, their journeys, their desires, you know, and also their hardships, you

05:02know. It comes from a very deeply personal space, you know, and the desire to sort of disrupt

05:08and take up spaces, you know, where brown women are not supposed to be, you know, also comes from

05:14a very personal space. And I'm determined to sort of make work that help other women, you know, walk

05:20the path that maybe I cannot walk or my mothers haven't been able to walk because that's what

05:25feminism is. You make things better for the generation that's coming after you, just like

05:30other women our ancestors did for us.

05:36Yeah, I mean, you know, the bigger project Blood Speaks, I mean, I started working on it in 2013,

05:43you know, and then in 2018, you know, we took the work back to Nepal in Kathmandu Mountain

05:49International Film Festival, and it was beautiful. There was so much sort of engagement with the

05:54grassroots activists, the women who some of them were in the mobilizers and women in the work came

05:59to see the films and the VR films and a little bit of exhibition. And we did a lot of activations

06:06around sort of, you know, code red and patriarchy. And then finally, there was a law that was passed

06:13to sort of, you know, ban menstrual exile, which is known as chowpadi in Nepal, Nepali societies.

06:20And it's now criminalized with a jail sentence and a fine. But of course, we do understand the

06:26changing of hearts and minds takes a long time, but it still helps every little bit helps each

06:31time you move forward and you pass a new law. And you pass you see a real impact of the work

06:36you've done also with let's not forget the actual people who are at the ground doing this on a daily

06:41organizing way, you know, people who are, you know, activism and organization is a daily practice.

06:47People are doing it on a daily basis. We are also doing trying to do this on a daily basis, you know,

06:52so we've seen some real impact. And it was important to then no longer go and re-victimize

06:57something that is already had some change and maybe let other people take on from it and do

07:02the work now on ground level and for us to then move the narrative into more magical,

07:07more sort of empowering ways so that, you know, the next generation, you know, that will see this,

07:12will kind of start from learning from a place of, you know, healing, empowerment and action,

07:20you know, rather than shame. So, so yeah, it's a long journey. That's all I can say.

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