Think Pink

Award-winning British documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto,58,is known for picking on women-centric issues for her films.

British filmmaker Kim Longinotto makes a documentary on the vigilante style of dispensing justice by UPs Gulabi Gang

Award-winning British documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto,58,is known for picking on women-centric issues for her films. So it comes as no surprise when she lets on that in her latest project,Pink Saris,she has focused on Sampat Pal Devi,a strong-willed village woman in Uttar Pradesh and her brigand of lathi-wielding,pink sari-clad ladies given to dispensing vigilante justice. I am looking for strong universal stories each time I set out to make a project. I dont deliberately seek women-centric issues, she says. The film was premiered at the 35th Toronto Film Festival recently. Its a privilege and I would like to thank Sampat Pal Devi for her graciousness in letting me shoot her for the film, she says,over phone from her London home.

For the 96-minute feature,Longinotto,a product of the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield,England,travelled to rural Uttar Pradesh in August 2009 to document the daily struggles among the lower caste communities in the Banda district of Bundelkhand,where Sampat Pal Devi hails from. Since 2002,Devi and her group of women followers,dressed in pink saris (and hence known as the Gulabi Gang),have kept guard over fellow women,soon becoming an authority unto themselves,feared by local law enforcement authorities and revered by fellow women in her native village in Atarra. She is all about women power and is not afraid of asserting her authority, says Longinotto,who spent three months living with Sampat Pal in the village.

The film follows the lives of five women,who frequent Devi,with concerns ranging from child marriage,elopements,child pregnancy and causing dishonour to the family. The locations are real and offer a fractional glimpse into the challenges Sampat Pal faces daily. I did not go there with preconceived ideas of what to shoot. Sampat Pal just acted as the springboard.

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