Opinion An all-woman team now helms a powerful Malayalam film body AMMA — and it’s just the start

Their victory, perhaps, has its roots in the 2017 rebellion by a group of 18 women in the Malayalam film industry in the wake of an incident of sexual assault on a female actor. A prominent actor was an accused in the case, charged with criminal conspiracy.

The protesting bunch then formed the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), working “towards building a safe, non-discriminatory and professional workspace for women in cinema through advocacy and policy change”. Members of the collective submitted a written appeal to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, calling for urgent action in the case and the problems faced by women in cinema.

In June 2017, the Kerala government constituted a committee headed by Justice K Hema, a former judge of the Kerala High Court, to study the issues faced by women in the Malayalam film industry. The international MeToo movement that erupted later in the year helped the WCC ram home the point it was trying to make.

In December 2019, the Hema Committee submitted its report to the state government. However, it was finally released only in August 2024, with several pages redacted. The report highlighted pervasive sexual exploitation and gender bias in the Malayalam film industry. It detailed the abysmal working conditions on sets, including lack of toilets and changing rooms for junior artistes.

The report led to heated debates and a furore over how the powerful boys’ clubs of regional cinemas enforced a silence on the rampant exploitation of the powerless for years. More skeletons tumbled out when the executive committee of AMMA resigned.

This turbulent history makes the present election result sweet and significant.

However, just getting a woman president may not bring in sweeping reforms in the organisation overnight, nor will it ameliorate the working standards of women in a flash. There will be challenges galore for the new board; working for the betterment of the industry won’t be easy, given the stubborn and deeply entrenched patriarchal attitudes.

Yet, when successive state and central governments have been dragging their feet for years on implementing women’s reservation in their respective houses, the election of women to helm an important organisation in the male-dominated industry of one small corner of the country holds some promise. The winning women at AMMA can relay hope to other fields as well, where women still fight disparity, harassment and misogyny.

This is just the beginning. The discrimination and exploitation will only end when a woman can be just a director or producer or president, and not a “woman director”, “woman producer” and “woman president”. That would be the actual recognition of women’s efforts and the real end of bias.

Here’s hoping that the women at the helm of AMMA will live up to the aim of the organisation: “To foster a professional platform where open and healthy discussion can be taken place and whereby it can exist as the collective force in all its earnestness and deliberate on any issues that come under the ambit of professional concern and relevance”.

Best of luck, Shwetha and team.

yamini.nair@expressindia.com