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Journalism of Courage
She sits at a desk in her boss cabin,taking notes while he speaks. His eyes glitter as he advances his hand towards hers. Clearly uncomfortable,she shirks his hand off,but he continues his advances while she attempts to squirm out of his grasp. The scene ends with him crumpling her notes and throwing them away. In another scene,a young man sits in his house,leafing through pictures of skimpily-clad women in a magazine,while a housemaid sweeps the floor silently. He looks up at her,tears a picture out and throws it on the floor near her. She picks it up and tries to hand it back to him,avoiding eye contact all the while. Instead of taking the picture back,he grabs her. Even without dialogues,its hard to mistake what message Sunil H Naik wants to send through his film Why Me?
This is how women are treated in our society. Not a day goes by that we dont hear of some case of abuse,or harassment or rape. Eve-teasing is such a common occurrence,no one even bothers to talk about it anymore, says Naik,whose film was recently presented the Best Creative Concept award during the Pune Short Film Festival (PSFF) at the National Film Archives of India.
Naik,who runs his own advertising firm in Goa,says the same attitude towards women is reinforced in everything we see around us,not the least in television advertisements. Most ads show women either attracted to men,or attempting to attract them and its taken for granted that this is what women are, he says. Naik,however,feels strongly about the issue and attempts to steer his advertising projects away from such themes. He says that as his interest in filmmaking began to grow,he explored several short films with social messages,but it was after he joined Satguru Foundation a Goa NGO that works for women that he thought of making Why Me?
While most short film competition regulations allow films up to 15 minutes long,Naik found four minutes enough to express his ideas about the subject. The film doesnt even use dialogues and you can watch it without sound and still grasp what it wants to say. Such is the power of short films, he says.
Apart from PSFF,Naik has also sent his film for competitions abroad,such as the Cannes Film Festival,as well as a few in the US. He is currently in Goa for the screening of the film at International Film Festival of India,and hopes to return to Pune for the Pune International Film Festival as well.
