Born Again: A short film salutes the brave spirit of acid attack survivors

Introduced this year, the section has eight films from across the world in competition. Ramaswamy’s film looks at various acid attack survivors in India and follows them as they talk of their daily struggles to live normal lives. For the 31-year-old Mumbai-based writer, who is best known for the script of Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan (2011), Newborns was never intended as a film project or even made keeping an audience in mind. “I was on a break and did not want to take up any films. I started researching about acid attack-related violence in the country and noticed a pattern in the way these incidents were being treated — public apathy, police inaction and sensationalist write-ups,” says Ramaswamy, who was inspired by the attack on staff nurse Preeti Rathi in Mumbai last year. She enrolled at a workshop as a volunteer with Stop Acid Attacks to meet survivors and listen to their stories.

The film opens with a voice-over of a survivor reading out her poem. The treatment is part experimental and represents a dystopian view of society where acid attack survivors are treated as misfits. There are views of crowded markets by night, motels, people staring at survivors on public transport, and sequences of survivors being candid before the camera — be it Laxmi, an acid attack campaigner dancing freely to a Bollywood song at her apartment or Nasreen sitting at a restaurant and having a bowl of soup.

The film evolved from interactions at various workshops that Ramaswamy attended with these survivors. “It was a cathartic process, but to break that down visually was challenging. When you have lost everything, you don’t want much.

They just wanted to talk. And we were sure that we did not want to portray the survivors as victims,” says Ramaswamy, who has featured only three survivors in the short film.

It is part of a larger narrative of a feature film, which she is currently producing with the help of Recyclewala Labs and producer Anand Gandhi. “The complete film will have 12 survivors. I have interacted with 29-30 cases so far,” says Ramaswamy, justifying the title of film as “the survivors having to relearn everything like newborns.”