Archived: Kumu Documentary: "Forgotten Woman"
Dilip Mehta offers a real world view of the life some women are forced to live in rural India once their husband dies.
As a sort of follow-up to his older sister Deepa Mehta’s Water —which looked at the plight of widows in India circa 1938—Dilip Mehta’s documentary The Forgotten Woman aims to put real faces on widows similar to those depicted in that Oscar-nominated Canadian film.
The movie, which opens in Vancouver on Friday (April 25), is a meandering journey through the ashrams and streets of Vrindavan, the final resting place for many widows, who, essentially, go there to die.
Photographer turned filmmaker Mehta—who was born and educated in India but moved to Toronto in the 1980s to help found Sunrise Films with his sister—lets his lyrical camerawork and subjects tell their sometimes heart-wrenching stories of poverty and neglect, which aren’t easy on the eyes. The film depicts the most marginalized people in Indian society, widows who are abandoned by their families and relatives once their husbands die.
Although the film focuses on the widows, it also comes across as an indictment of modern India’s failure to eradicate widespread poverty despite the country’s emergence as an economic power. It implicates India’s failure to move away from centuries-old feudal caste/class systems that denigrate its marginalized citizens, particularly women and children.
The film will be screened in English, Hindi and Bengalese with Estonian subtitles.