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Interview with Ligy Pullappally

Ligy Pullappally is the director of The Journey, a new film making the festival rounds in the U.S., and the first film to seriously address lesbian love in India since Fire in 1996. In a new interview, she talks to us about lesbianism in India, the movie, and the tragic true story that inspired it.

Warning: this interview contains spoilers for the movie.

AE: Has your movie screened in India? LP: It has screened in India. It was a selection at the Indian International Film Festival in January of this year and at the Bombay International Film Festival shortly thereafter.

AE: And what has the reception been like in India? LP: Well, it’s been varied reactions. When it screened before outside of the state that I shot the film in, the reactions have been great and the critics have loved the film and it won awards and things like that. However, within the state I shot it–I had one public screening in the state of Kerala and there there was a lot of very vocal opposition to the subject matter of the film. Not necessarily whether it was a good film or not but just heckling along the lines of “You’re trying to turn our kids gay.”

AE: So there’s maybe more of a concern with how it’s portraying Keralans whereas people in other states didn’t have such a problem with the portrayal because maybe it’s not necessarily reflecting them–or they can make that assumption. LP: That’s exactly it. I guess it’s when it’s in your own backyard, it’s a whole different story altogether. And there’s no distance from it when the characters are speaking your language and it’s your community. I think that’s where the criticism came. But at that same screening there was actually a large number of the queer community who came. Although they were vocal in their support during the question and answer period after the film, the interesting thing is they came up to me in private to say they were members of the community and thanking me for making the film. So that was the first public screening in Kerala and it was the third festival that I was at–a touring festival called Made By Women. It’s a festival in India that goes to eight major cities, from Trivandrum in the South to New Delhi and Calcutta in the north, and all the films were made by women. However, mine was the only one made by an Indian woman in that festival because of the fact that there are so few Indian women making films.

AE: So it’s basically an international festival and it tours only within India? LP: That’s right. It’s an international festival and all the films have women at the helm. Oh, and one of the interesting things, I did win an award in India. It’s a critics’ award, though. That was the Special Jury Prize of the John Abraham award, which basically says that my film was the second best film in 2004. Another film was named first place, and I don’t know if the lesbian element had anything to do with me coming in second or not, but in any event, it is a big honor to receive that award from the state where I made the film.

AE: It sounds like there’s been a lot of concern with how it portrays a community, which is interesting because that’s a theme within the film itself for obvious reasons. It seems that there’s a lot of concern within, say, Delilah’s family about how it looks to the neighbors. That sort of thing. LP: Exactly.

AE: Which is an international theme. LP: [Laughs] You draw interesting parallels, but yeah, that’s absolutely true.

AE: You’ve been touring festivals in this country as well. How many screening have you had so far in the U.S.? LP: Oh, I just actually wrote it down because I’m preparing a memo. The film was just picked up by Wolfe distribution–that’s late breaking news. So, it screened at the following mainstream festivals: Chicago, Palm Springs, Indian International in Mumbai (that’s Bombay International), Washington D.C. and Seattle International. Then at the following LGBT festivals: Boston, Inside Out Toronto, Newfest in New York, Frameline in San Francisco, and it has upcoming screenings in Outfest L.A. and at the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. It’s also been screening at women’s festivals and South Asian festivals, so it screened at the Made By Woman film festival and at the Indian Film Festival in Los Angeles.

AE: So it seems you’ve gotten a lot of exposure so far; it’s been booked in a lot of festivals. LP: Yes, and around the U.S. quite a bit.

AE: And have you been traveling with it and doing Q & As at these screenings? LP: I have been so far. Not every festival but a large umber of them.

AE: And have you had any questions that keep coming up at the Q & As? LP: Yeah, there are the questions that people really want to know. There’s “How did you get the actors–what is their background?” and “What’s the budget of the film?” and “What was the reaction in India?” Indians are perceived as conservative when it comes to LGBT issues. Yeah, just questions along those lines I get very often.

AE: And are you tired of the comparisons to Fire? LP: [Laughs] Actually no, because I really liked Fire, despite its premise about the characters’ homosexuality being a fallback position because of the failure of heterosexual relationships. But I thought Fire was a well made film. It’s beautifully shot with a storyline that moves forward quickly. It wasn’t a tiresome story at all. And I know one of the actors in the film, so I don’t mind comparisons to Fire at all. But Fire and The Journey are two different films. That film is English language, for one, and mine is in an Indian language, Malayalam.

AE: You grew up in Chicago, is that correct? LP: Yeah, from the age of six I have been living in Chicago. I grew up on the north side.

AE: And why did you leave India? LP: Well, I was only six, so I came with my parents. I had no choice. But I went back to India after having practiced law in Chicago for seven years.

AE: Was that the first time you’d been back? LP: Not the first time but my relationship after immigrating to the United States with India was really just vacations, like a summer holiday. I’d been back to India three times since I left in 1975 and when I moved back in 2002 it was basically to live there and start the research for my film.

AE: At that point how long did you live there for? LP: I lived in India, all told, for about two, two and a half years. I came back intermittently. I came back to the U.S. a couple of times during that period, but basically between the research, the writing, pre-production, production, and post-production, it came to about two and a half years.

AE: I’d imagine you have a lot of memories from your early years in India. Was that experience reflected in the film? Or were you in an urban area? LP: It absolutely reflects it in the film. My family is from mountains and valleys in the north of Kerala. So my experience of India is really a rural, South Indian experience, and that’s very much reflected in the film. In fact, when I had finished the script and was showing it around to get comments, somebody asked me, “Why didn’t you make it urban? That’s so much more interesting than rural India.” That’s entirely subjective, but I actually didn’t feel like I had enough background to represent urban India. And Fire was also urban, so… But my family lived in rural India so what I show is a rural setting.

AE: It seemed that the natural surroundings in the film, they almost functioned as an additional character. Is that something you were striving for? LP: You know, there’s a lot of biblical imagery in the film because I come from a Catholic background and twelve years of Catholic school. And, in fact, the setting is the Garden of Eden. It’s really delving into the pre-writing thought process, but yeah, it is that sort of perfect, natural wonderland.

AE: And innocence lost. LP: Yes, and knowledge gained and being changed therefrom. The first shot you see of Delilah as an adult, she’s offering fruit to Kiran, which is a deliberate Eve metaphor–the giving of knowledge.

AE: Getting back to Fire for a second, for a lot of Americans, Fire is probably one of only a handful of Indian movies that they’ve seen. And there’s also the lesbian element that makes the comparison come forth. So, how do you think your movie might change American viewers’ perspectives about homosexuality in India? LP: I think that, most importantly, what makes it distinct from Fire is that the girls make the choice based on love, just love and not the failure of heterosexual relationships. And I really wanted to make that film, because Fire had existed out there since 1996, and I didn’t want that to be the only thing representing lesbians in India. So that’s the primary difference. And there are other issues.

For instance, it doesn’t hit anybody over the head, but the two women in the film are different religions. Delilah’s Catholic and Kiran’s Hindu, but a secular Hindu, which is very common in Kerala, where people are Hindu, but it’s very much a lifestyle. It’s not something that’s advertised but they’re actually two different faiths. The thing is, in India people can find the little things that draw that distinction. One girl wears a cross all the time; you can tell from her jewelry, from her house, from the fact that she prays with her grandmother–things like that. But Kiran you can really tell from the family names, like Priya and Narayanan, that her name is Kiran, that the house is a Hindu architecture, that there’s a basil plant growing in the front yard, which is part of the Hindu faith in Kerala–these types of things. These are two people of different faiths, but at no point is the issue ever about a clash of faith. You don’t really notice that.

AE: Right. And in general there’s a lot of subtlety to the film. I found it beautiful and lyrical. I liked the way it wasn’t dialogue-heavy, there was a lot of just showing what was going on in their relationship. I was curious if you made a conscious decision not to have explicit love scenes. I was wondering if you thought that was unnecessary. LP: Yes, I thought it was unnecessary because my intention’s always been that this is going to be released in Kerala–I’m still working towards that–and when the film is released in Kerala I want it to be positive and be a representation for young gay people, at least in the state but probably all over India, because the film is being screened in other cities, and different gay and lesbian organizations have requested the film in Delhi and Bangalore and places like that. And because the goal is positive representation and to get a mainstream community to see the film, get them in to see the film and get them to understand this as all about love, all about something natural, you know? And India is already very sensitive to sex, and even kissing is not really permissible in films. So a sex scene, like in a film like Better Than Chocolate, is never going to happen in Indian films.

And as for anything more explicit being shown–I didn’t want the film to be about sex. I wanted it to be about choice of love. And I didn’t want to cause a controversy just for the sake of causing a controversy, and I would have if I’d tried to include more sexual content.

And the other factor is that in order to get the rating that I did, which is a UA rating, which is equivalent to PG-13, I needed to be subtle in my depiction of their physical relationship with each other. And I did get the equivalent of a PG-13, which means that young people can enter the theater to see the film, and in turn their parents will understand that this is not an adult film that they should prevent their kids from going to. So there a lot of factors involved in why I made the scenes as subtle as I did. But personally I think the way I shot the sex scenes, as it were, I don’t think it leaves anything in doubt. I think it does engage the audience’s imagination for a part of the narrative, because they have to fill in those spaces between touches, and I think it is sensual enough.

AE: It would really make it a different project if you had been more explicit, and I can understand what you’re saying about trying to reach a wider audience. Do know if Fire had a UA rating as well? LP: I highly doubt it.

AE: Have there been any films between Fire and this one–I’m sure there have been Bollywood films that have had a little lesbian aspect to it but probably more for the titillation. But in terms of any kind of serious examination, has there been any other film that’s been released or toured festivals? LP: There are three films out of India with lesbian themes. One is Fire, two is The Journey, and three is a film called Girlfriend.

AE: Yes, I’ve actually seen that one. LP: You have? [Laughs] I was actually thinking of throwing myself off the balcony during intermission just so I could avoid the second half.

AE: Yeah, it’s very different than your film. LP: Actually, I just watched it because I figured there’d be questions about Girlfriend, not because I’d heard anything good about it. But that was Bollywood filmmaking on the subject, and the Bollywood take on it is to pathologize homosexuality. So you have this demon lesbian who doesn’t die after she’s stabbed, and ultimately has to be thrown from a balcony for the heterosexual couple to be free to live their lives.

Those are three. Then there are other films out there that have treated lesbianism as a very subtle side issue, but these are the only three that have dealt with it directly.

AE: How does your film continue your public interest work? I know you were a public interest attorney for a long time, and do you see a parallel in what you’re doing as a filmmaker now? LP: Well, I don’t know how you can… I understand that films are all about entertainment. You have to make feature films to entertain people. The story has to move, the scene has to be interesting, the narrative has to be engaging. So that was foremost on my mind, along with the social agenda that I had, so yes, this film had activist reasons behind making it. I think that it’s going to be hard for me to move away from that. I’m planning on staying in feature filmmaking and I have another film in mind that I’m in the writing process for right now. It has both gay and lesbian themes, and I’m planning on shooting in India. But right now it’s just at the scriptwriting phase. The fact that I’m portraying people of different sexualities, I feel I have a social responsibility when I do that.

AE: If you consider that there’s a social cause along with the entertainment that you’re trying to get across, has film enabled you to accomplish things in that area that you hadn’t been able to do in your prior career? LP: It enables me to do different things. As a lawyer I was doing what I felt was the right thing, but as a Chicago-based trial lawyer, there wasn’t much I could do in Kerala that would reach the mainstream. Film is an amazing medium because of how it gets out, how accessible it is to people. To make my intentions for Kerala come true, which was to try to do something, anything that I could do about the lesbian suicides happening there, I think that this was probably the best thing, or the most direct thing that I could do.

AE: I heard that it was inspired by a suicide, a young woman who was a university student in Kerala. Is that true? LP: Yes, that’s true.

AE: What made you decide to make your film in Malayalam? LP: I made this film in Kerala in the Malayalam language because it is very much a Kerala story. Circumstances, like the one described in the story have happened time and time again in Kerala. In another such story, two young women tied themselves together with a dupatta and threw themselves, together, into a rock quarry. These desperate stories are frighteningly abundant in Kerala. The stories are sometimes reported in newspapers, but most go unreported, as the surviving family members have an interest in keeping the shame and scandal fallout to a minimum. There is a watchdog organization in Kerala keeping track of the incidents, they are that frequent.

AE: And had you made your short film Uli before you heard about that suicide or after? LP: Before. It was just one of these bizarre coincidences. It really just stayed with me, the story of these two young women in India.

AE: And can you tell me a little bit about Uli? LP: It’s actually the sequel to this film. The story is about after Delilah comes to the United States with Sebastian. But the story is about her adult daughter and how the daughter finds out about her mother’s secret history that’s basically traumatized her for all her life.

AE: Is there a suicide referred to in that film? LP: There is. In fact, in the short film, the lover of Delilah does commit suicide.

AE: Is that Kiran? LP: It is Kiran, but in the feature film I did not want a suicide there because I had different intentions for the feature film. The short film was just basically something I’d written the script for and thought, “Let me just shoot this and see what it looks like.” I didn’t submit the film to festivals except for two or three short film festivals in Chicago, but that’s as far as it went. I put it away and then dragged it out when some friends came over. Other than that it had no particular life.

AE: There might be more interest now after The Journey. It seems, though, that it’s quite a different thing to have basically a short film that takes place with a suicide sort of in the background–having that happen in the past and showing what happens surrounding it–as opposed to if you had made The Journey end in a suicide, in terms of what you were saying about homosexuality being pathologized. LP: Yeah, when I originally wrote the feature-length script I did have a suicide in there but it was so unbearably sad, I could barely take it. And when I described the story to my mother, she started crying, it was just so sad. And then I showed it to my friends and they were like, “Oh my God, please take out the suicide! It’s so sad, it’s unbearable.”

AE: So it was by popular request. LP: It’s not only really sad, it sends a bad message. So I took it out and I was much happier with the triumphant ending rather than that.

AE: So, if you don’t mind, can you tell me how you found the actors and what their backgrounds were? LP: Sure. Kiran and Delilah are portrayed by Suhasini V. Nair and Shrruiti Menon. Suhasini, who played Kiran, is formerly a soap opera star. She started in her childhood, she was a child actress and into her teens she was still acting. And the way I found her was I was watching a feature film and she was just a side character who walked in with a group of girlfriends and talked to the heroine of that particular film. And when I saw her she just was amazing. So beautiful and such am amazing presence, and so I called her up for an audition and she was so intent on this role. Maybe because she’s a professional actor, she know exactly how. She called me all the time, a couple times a week. She told me, “I have been in character for the past week, and I’ve been walking like the character, talking like the character, and I really feel that I can pull this off.” And I was going back and forth between her and one other good actress. Finally, I saw her on her soap opera and I couldn’t believe how expressive her face was. She conveyed so much with her eyes. And then I was frantic. I though, What if she books another film during my dates? So I called her up after that and said to just block the dates and she was thrilled. So that’s Suhasini.

The other actress is Shrruiti Menon, and Shrruiti lives in Bombay, and she is a professional model and a full-time student in Bombay. She’s also Miss Kerala 2002; she’s a beauty queen. And that’s how I found her. I cast a pretty wide net in the screening process because I was looking for people who were very young, and so I looked through all kinds of different channels, not just casting agents and stuff like that. So I saw her at the Miss Kerala Festival headquarters, and when I saw her the look sold it, because she had so much fire, and this was sort of like the reckless beauty. And I just hoped she could act. So she came down for the interview from Bombay and it was going to be her first feature film, so she was a little bit rough around the edges, but we did one week of rehearsal and the two of them got very comfortable with each other. And we rehearsed all of the difficult scenes until I felt they could just relax into it, and it finally came out on the big screen very naturally. Some chemistry was there between the two of them, and they turned out to be good choices, I think.

AE: Definitely. I’m impressed that one was a non-actor, because that’s not apparent in the film. And it sounds too like you didn’t have to do a whole lot of convincing of people to come near the roles. It sounds like there was a lot of interest. LP: It’s so funny, because I interviewed or auditioned about 40 to 50 women, and the funny thing is they all said yes except for one, who I thought might’ve been actually queer, so the role was too close. [Laughs] So she didn’t want to have to deal with her own personal issues. Yeah, I thought that that would be more difficult. A lot of people were saying to me that this is a role that rarely comes along, a once in a lifetime chance, just a rare opportunity.

AE: Can you tell me anything about the community that the girls live in, and the matriarchal traditions in the households and how that affects the story? LP: Kerala is formerly a matrilineal culture, and I think that changed with the influence of the British, but I think there are traces of that culture still existing. And among the traces is that the women work in Kerala outside the home, as opposed to other places, where that’s discouraged and women are encouraged to work inside the home. Because the women work outside the home, it means they’re better educated. Women working outside the home can earn money and maybe as a result there are lower rates of female infanticide and virtually no cases of things like bride burning in the state. And perhaps like other countries, like anywhere, you get some very strong women characters in Kerala. That’s not unique to Kerala. But the characters, both mothers are very strong women–Delilah’s mother and Kiran’s mother–but in different ways.

Delilah’s mother is a widow who has had to raise her sons and her daughter by herself, and that’s part of the reason why she thinks the way she does, which is keep moving forward, focus on stability and financial wellbeing, and those things are tied into things like reputation. Because if a girl doesn’t have her reputation, what’s left? When Delilah’s mother finds out that two kids in her class have run away together, the Muslim girl and the Hindu boy, she says, “What’s the point going out and getting that girl back? Now that her reputation’s gone, nothing’s left.” That’s an attitude that actually prevails, not just in Kerala but in many parts of India.

AE: Delilah’s grandmother, maybe it’s because she’s of a different generation, has less concern maybe with community perception and more concern with her granddaughter’s welfare, would you say? LP: She’s a person with an abundance of love, and, like people who have grown up with an abundance of love, she is generally not critical of other people. She thinks everybody is all right, you know? She’s not trying to criticize anybody for their choices. Part of it is as an older person, she has seen and heard a lot, and she knows what can kill you and what can make you stronger. She’s different from Delilah’s mother in that way. She’s like, Don’t act like this is the end of the world. Whether she would have wanted Delilah to marry a man or not is a question, but what we can say is that she didn’t want Delilah to be forced into a marriage as a result of finding out that she’s been involved in a relationship with Kiran. She thinks the forcing of marriage to save a reputation is a pointless endeavor. She’s also someone who knows about the relationship and doesn’t try to stop Delilah. As to why that is, I just have to say, she understands how risky it is, but she doesn’t think it’s the end of the world and she doesn’t think it’s bad. And maybe she had a relationship of her own…

AE: And despite her support of Delilah, she still isn’t able to change what happens, and maybe that’s a function of her generation. It’s really up to Delilah’s mother how things go with the marriage. LP: Yeah, because Delilah’s mother runs the household, and her grandmother really doesn’t have a say about that. I mean, she can express herself, but in terms of the final decision, it’s up to Delilah’s mother.

AE: Had you ever done subtitling before this, and were you ever frustrated by not being able to translate certain things? LP: Yeah, I was, because like with any language, words have connotations that are not directly translatable in the brief subtitling format that’s favored for films. A book like God of Small Things, which is about of Kerala, really captures the essence of the language. In long form those nuances can come out, but for film subtitling, because the images flash one after another, the subtitles have to be read in a flash. That was a little frustrating, but because I made the film as visual as possible, like if you turned off the subtitling and turned off the sound, you would still understand the film from the visual images. And because of that, the general meaning of things carries forward.

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