A long wait for truth

Shoma A. Chatterji

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Actor-turned-director Ananth Mahadevan’s latest film Mai Ghat —103/2005 has just bagged the Hiralal Sen Memorial Best Film Award at the 25th Kolkata International Film Festival. The film is based on the real-life experience of Prabhavati Amma of Kerala. She fought through the legal machinery of the state to get justice for the torture and death in custody of her teenage son for no crime at all. The son was a rag-picker and was picked up by the police on a false charge of theft. It took her 13 long years. By the time justice came about, she was an old woman.

Mahadevan chose to make the film in Marathi. Having lived in Mumbai and familiar with the language and culture of the Maharashtrians, he found it easier to make the film in Marathi. Says Mahadevan, “Mohini Gupta, who had just co-produced Tamil hit Super Deluxe was as moved by the story as I was. She realised that this was significant cinema waiting to be told and immediately came on-board to make the film a reality in record time. If it wasn’t for her decision-making skills, films like Mai Ghat would have remained concepts on paper.”

Mai Ghat is an actual water body in Sangli. It uncannily made an appropriate title for the story. The protagonist is a washerwoman who cleans the dirt of society in the ghat. It all fitted in perfectly with the theme. The water is a metaphor for the soul cleansing that happens in the film. The mother’s ageing is shown through her daily chores — washing clothes on the ghat, ironing them, folding them, sorting them and then delivering them either from home or going outdoors. Her silence on her son’s brutal murder by the two policemen is deceptive because she is determined to fight till the end even when the accused policemen threaten her with dire consequences. They are awarded the death sentence.

The film is enriched by superlative acting skills of young Usha Jadhav who plays Prabha Mai and veteran Suhasini Mulay, who plays her dedicated lawyer from beginning to end. Jadhav is very young yet she displays the fast ageing process with great conviction. 

The camera is another hero of this brilliant film, capturing the understated facial expressions of the mother as easily as it captures Nature in its quiet and turbulent moods when the sky turns cloudy and the water body where the mother spends most of her days gets angry and turbulent. In its low-key use of sepia tones, black-and-white and muted colours, the camera enhances the seriousness of the subject and strips it of glamour.

Mahadevan demonstrates restraint on the script and his actors which shows in the smooth flow of the narrative and evolving of the characters. “All characters — from the cops, wife, son, his friend and his mother — were handpicked from versatile theatre actors who were faces in the crowd, helping us make the film more believable and flesh-and-blood,” sums up Mahadevan.