Maadathy, an Unfairy Tale and Conversation with the Filmmaker

Event time: 
Friday, September 27, 2024 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ), L02 See map
320 York Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Calendar Speaker/Performer: 
Leena Manimekalai
Event description: 

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 Whitney Humanities Center and Yale MacMillan South Asian Studies Council

Admission: 
Free