After being screened at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival’s Marche du Films section, Indian filmmaker Aneek Chaudhuri’s silent film, “White,” that talks about sexual assault on women, is now an official selection for the 2018 Indian Film Festival of Melbourne. The festival is set for August 2018.
“Being a part of such an honorable event will fetch more credibility to the film,” Chaudhuri said in a statement. “Since ‘White’ is an independent venture aiming at film festivals, of course we would like to earn more laurel leaves and the Melbourne inclusion in a huge booster for the team.”
In “White,” the Kolkata-based indie filmmaker attempts to tell stories of three women who have survived sexual assaults and are now fighting back to lead a stronger life. “White” conjoins three tales based on a similar theme, however, each woman has her own life and a way of leading it. The film stars Kaushik Roy and Arjaa Banerjee.
“Rape is an issue that is universal; no verbal language is enough to decode the pain and suffering,” Chaudhuri said. “Moreover, I wanted global approach and I believe that a silent film would take away any kind of language barrier from the film; this in turn, would make it approachable by a wider spectrum of audiences throughout the globe.”
The first tale is of a factory girl getting abused at work and her story of survival; the second story follows a single mother and her inability to face her own child after the heinous crime. This is a story of the child’s upbringing in an orphanage and her return to her childhood home after two decades; and the third and the last tale is how a husband accepts a child born out of rape of his wife by another man in the village and gives the child his name.
