Mumbai International Film Festival Preview | … And the Unclaimed

If you sniffle, shed a few tears or bawl outright during the documentary … And the Unclaimed, it’s perfectly all right. That is precisely the intent of film-maker Debalina Majumder.

In fact, every time there’s a screening, Majumder’s editor, Abhro Bannerjee, asks her, “Did people cry?”

Unlike most documentaries, …And the Unclaimed, which will be shown in the Indian Competition section at the Mumbai International Film Festival, being organized by the Films Division from 3-9 February, emphatically seeks to provoke an emotional response, which is not surprising considering its subject: the double suicide of lesbian lovers in Nandigram in West Bengal in February 2011. Swapna and Sucheta killed themselves after Sucheta got married. The young women were rejected in life as well as in death by their families. Their bodies lay in a government morgue for days before being cremated unceremoniously.

In a heart-rending letter, which reads like a manifesto, Swapna, a tuition teacher, pleads “If we die together, please keep us together somewhere, by any means”.

Majumder wields the letter as a framing device as well as a conscience prodder. She interviews queer men and women about their lives and also gets them to read out the letter in various public places—by the river, in a tram, on a hand-pulled rickshaw. The idea is to create a kind of boundary-less memorial for the ostracized lovers, to make their experience public and to scatter their words with the wind. “The letter is not just a letter, it is a statement,” Majumder says. “She is talking to the mother, the father, society—that is why I had it read out in public places.”

The 64-minute film opens with Banani, a fashion designer who was disowned by her parents after she came out to them, reading the letter and choking up. In one of the more disturbing moments, the elderly father of Swarup, a married man who calls himself Rupa and identifies himself as a transsexual, reads a portion of the letter and then stops out of what appears to be discomfort at being made to participate in the exercise and empathy over his son’s plight.

The documentary has been produced by the Kolkata group Sappho for Equality, of which Majumder is a member, and emerged out of a fact-finding mission into the deaths by the group. The group visited the village where the women lived and interviewed Swapna’s family members and Sucheta’s bewildered husband Bikash (other members of her family refused to be interviewed). Majumder, who has previously explored the queer experience in Katha Monologues (2008), went along with a camera.

“It was very weird, the parents were all relieved by the deaths,” she recalls. “In fact, Bikash seemed the most upset. Then when I heard that the bodies had not been claimed but were lying abandoned at a morgue, l broke down. You can’t imagine that you will die and your entire family will desert your body only because of your sexual orientation. I knew I had to do something for Swapna, Sucheta and the community.”

The widespread bigotry against homosexuals in the state is aptly expressed by an officer at a police station in Nandigram, who says they are “sick people”. The assertion by a professor interviewed for the film, that the women’s deaths represent political oppression of all hues, is far less convincing, but his other suggestion, “Let there be a heart-wrenching wail in your film”, guides the footage.

The self-taught film-maker, who picked up her cinematography stills during a stint at a Bengali television channel, did wrestle with the ethics of making public a personal piece of communication. “The letter was personal, but it operated on so many levels,” Majumder argues. “At times it speaks to the parents, to you, to society. I didn’t know these people when they were alive. The act of making the private public is political.”

Registrations for the Mumbai International Film Festival are open. Click here for details on …And The Unclaimed.