Life in three minutes

Shoma A. Chatterji

A three-minute film, Third Gender, directed by documentary filmmaker Viplab Majumder, recently won the Special Jury Award at Canvas by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and is part of the official selection at the Mumbai International Festival of Films. The short film has bagged an award for the second Best Film at the Human Rights Commission of India. How and why does a three-minute film, that too on a subject as deep and extensive as the Third Gender, appeal to the respective juries so strongly?

The first thing that strikes is the unusual structure of the film. The movie has been shot entirely in black and white. Then, it has no dialogue at all. The ‘story’ is narrated by a male voiceover which happens to be that of the protagonist. The protagonist is shown mostly in silhouettes and shadows and from unique perspectives. The voiceover is composed like a poem in Hindi, which the transgender recites to his mother, who has failed to cope with the reality of having borne a “different” child.

Talking about the trigger that set off the film, Majumder says, “I find it tragic that though normal parents give birth to a Third Gender child, it is the parents who often distance themselves from such children, precisely because they are different. Since the time span was just three minutes, I decided to give it a very experimental and abstract structure that dominates the story and allows the protagonist, a Third Gender person, to have his say.”

The indoor shoot was done at a friend’s place in Mumbai while the location was Madh Island, he says.

About making the film in black and white, he says, a mother with child belonging to the Third Gender has no colour in her life and neither has the person born to her. “So why should I make it in colour?” he asks rhetorically.

“I already had a script for a full-length feature film called Caesar on this subject. But I have not been getting a producer for the film. One day, I simply sat down and composed this poem. Then, I discussed it with my cinematographer and friend Adri Thakur whether the three-minute poem could be turned into a film. We ended up making Third Gender,” he adds.

“We shot it in two days, editing and sound took three days, one day for censorship. If I calculate the days from writing to censorship, it took four months,” elaborates Viplab.

“Within the mainstream society that we live in, the Third Gender is always a question mark, not a period or a comma or any other mark of punctuation. We know them as human beings, but not as men or women. Here, as a human being, we are to find out where they are coming from and what they want and how do they grow without a mother in their lives,” he sums up.