Film Screening of "Maadathy, an Unfairy Tale" and Conversation with Filmmaker Leena Manimekalai

This is the tale of an adolescent girl who grew up in an “unseeable” Dalit caste group in southern India whose forced occupation is to wash clothes of other Dalits, the dead, and menstruating women. She transcends her lot and becomes immortalised as their local deity, Maadathy.

Leena Manimekalai, who will join us for the screening, is a leading Tamil poet and a multiple award-winning filmmaker. Her strong repertoire of films with an impressive exhibition record covering over 100 International Film Festivals includes the acclaimed “Maadathy, An Unfairy Tale,” the “Sengadal, the Dead Sea,” “White Van Stores,” “Is it Too Much to Ask,” “Goddesses,’” and “My Mirror is the Door.” She is an interventionist, and her forte is participatory filmmaking. Her tryst with censorship, both constitutional and extra constitutional, as a brown queer female body, as a poet, and as a politically unapologetic filmmaker is in itself a meta-narrative in her journey as an artist. She was recently chosen as a BAFTA India Breakthrough Talent (2022-23), named Artist in Residence by the Jackman Humanities Institute - University Toronto (2023) and Centre for Free Expression - Toronto Metropolitan University (2023), and profiled as one of the twenty artists who inspire change globally by PEN America (2023). She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Film from York University and is currently teaching undergraduate students at the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto, Mississauga. “Saracura,” a participatory climate film with the Afro Indigenous Quilombola community at Amazonia, is her latest work in development.

Co-sponsored by The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, Whitney Humanities Center, South Asian Studies Council