Once upon a time…

I did not have the Disney coloured childhood everybody else seems to have had… Colours Black is about sentiments such as these, which fall outside the accepted framing of a picture perfect Indian family.

I was attempting an adult film with children (?!)… a first film with children (suicidal!)…in a format which mocked at the Wagah boundary between fiction and non-fiction…needless to mention I was a very nervous first time director!

The idea originated in the work of MAJLIS wherein an innocuous divorce trial threw up many uncomfortable questions about the middle and upper classes' perception of their home sweet home and a parallel, very different reality existing within the same walls. It sent my researcher, a lawyer Veena Gowda and me delving into the taboo subject of sexual abuse of children within the family. At the end of the research was this mass of information in terms of statistics and personal accounts, which exploded many a myth associated with childhood and the cocoon provided by a family. The journey from there to the short film, Colours Black, was an exciting one which I share here with you...

Often, having a so called 'social issue' as a theme endows you with the liberty of poor imagery, incoherent narrative and a low technical quality. It is almost as if they lend credibility to the cause and qualify it as a 'true' representor of reality. This notion seems to be a fallout of associating news with accurate representation of reality. The poor quality of footage acquired in the hurly burly of daily reporting somehow governs the style of documentary filmmaking in India! But even in my exploration of the dark subject of incest I found so much beauty that it would be have been misrepresentation to make a film that takes the viewer away from it. The divide between high aesthetics and social engagement I found to be utterly false.

The colour palette for Colours Black consisted of the brightest primary shades as that constituted the world of a sexually abused child. It is not only within the shadows and dark dingy corners that children are sexually abused…it is within 'normal' homes where the parents believe they are bringing up their children just right because they get their share of Disney comics to read, Shaktimaan to watch and favourite flavour of icecream to savour every week. I also wanted to recall the seductive power of images which sell the concept of the 'great Indian family' in the process of selling cars, colas or sare jahan se acha India… subliminally influencing a mother to ignore the distress signals sent by her child that an uncle or a father or a grandfather was abusing her/him. How essential this faith in the make believe world of the 'hamara sukhi parivaar and the pet dog' is to our existence can be judged by the mild disbelief with which you would be reading this article…!

I was eager to make form respond to content in the film. In the accounts of adults who were sexually abused when they were young, there appeared to be many blurred areas. Owing to the time gap and the person's emotional interpretations of a memory, the person was never very clear about what exactly happened. These past memories traumatise and haunt and govern a person's present in many unpredictable ways. Incorporating this in the form, I had the recorded non-fiction intruding into the fictional narrative in a simulation of the abused adult's psyche. For me, the creative climax was reached in the film when there is a complete breakdown of the distinctions between the various stories in the fiction, the voices from non-fiction, the black and white and the colour.

Statistics - a necessary evil in convincing an unwilling and disbelieving audience. I wanted to achieve all that statistics does without its usage. A checklist of information - firmly erasing the belief that it happens only in the slums or morally decadent societies like the West, the category of adults who come up in research as the most frequent offenders, the kind of language and traps laid by the abuser, the children's unique ways of expressing their bewilderment and anguish which completely escape an adult's eye, the completely contrasting ways in which an abuse so far back in time can affect an adult, the dismissing manner in which we bring up our children whereby they are just seen as individuals in construction and not individuals in their own right……… To say this and a lot more without adopting a newsreel approach was the biggest challenge.

The biggest surprise was working with children as performers. Once we established a platform of equality, the children were more than willing to add, delete, react to the script. Perhaps they were particularly involved as the fiction dealt with their expressions and not with factual accounts of how an abuse occurs.

The sound design carried all the creative concerns forward…the clicks of the ubiquitous hotshot camera, the tearing of a sheet of paper, the song on child Ram played over and over to us in childhood - the ordinariness of them all lends additional violence as they are evoked in the context of a child being sexually abused.

Needless to mention, none of the above could have even been contemplated without the aid of cameraman 'Murali' (C.K. Moorlidharan), the master of evocative framing, Shyamal Karmakar, a ruthless and skillful editor of NG takes, sound recordist Bhaskar Pal and music director Tushar Bhatia with their precise craft and Sonia and Nita with their sweep of practical efficiency. MAJLIS with its unique combination of a legal and cultural centre provided the platform to embark on such a venture.

Mamta Murthy is a graduate of IRMA (Institution of Rural Management, Anand). After a stint with an advertising agency she has worked in several feature and non-fiction films as assistant director. Colours Black is her first independent work. Colours Black has been screened at Film South Asia 2001 and included as a part of their travelling theatre. It has also won the Grand Prix at the 9th Biennale of Festival of Moving Images, Geneva, 2001.