The Cutting Edge

Something quite legendary happened last week. My Little Princess, directed by Eva Ionesco—no relation of the absurd theatre genius Eugene—won the Golden Gateway award at this year’s Mumbai Film Festival. There are two reasons why this is noteworthy. One is that My Little Princess belongs to that rare clutch of films that have won the highest prize in a festival despite being screened upside down, which is how it was shown at the Mumbai Film Festival. The other reason is that by awarding My Little Princess, the festival has made a statement: it’s no shrinking violet. Bring on the provocative content; we can not only watch it, but also give it $100,000 in prize money.

The Mumbai Film Festival, or MAMI as it continues to be called (MAMI is short for the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image, which organises the festival), is one of the representations of new India. It can afford the best of international fare. Which in this case has meant including films that have been the toast of festivals like Cannes and Toronto in the MAMI line-up. Last year, we saw Somewhere, Biutiful, The Social Network, Certified Copy and many other gems both old and new. The list was just as impressive this year: Melancholia, Pina, Tabloid, Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, Restless, to name a few. This time around, it seems that the festival organisers also wanted to show that they appreciate controversial topics too, because whether or not you liked My Little Princess as a movie, there’s no avoiding how scandalous it is.

Ionesco’s film is about a woman whose career as an artist takes off when she starts photographing her young daughter in the nude. The story is partially autobiographical—Ionesco became her mother Irina’s favourite model when she was five-years-old. This wouldn’t have been controversial if Irina Ionesco’s photographs of her daughter weren’t decidedly erotic. Ionesco junior went on to become Playboy’s youngest nude model (she was 11 when she was featured in the magazine). My Little Princess quite obviously draws on Ionesco’s childhood experiences. Whether or not Irina was as manipulative and selfish as the mother in My Little Princess, who tricks her unwilling daughter into modelling and keeps selling the photographs even when her daughter asks her not to, is not known.

Of course, the jury for the award was mostly foreign, but how ironic that the Mumbai Film Festival awarded top honours to a film with a scandalous topic. It gives the impression that Mumbai, and India, is open to films that have controversial content when the fact of the matter is that movies in India (much like every other cultural product, as is obvious from Delhi University’s recent decision to “drop” A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana from its syllabus) are constantly facing the censorship scare. This is not just at the level of getting a certificate from the censor board, which has proved to be a massive obstacle for many filmmakers. Even once a film has got that clearance, it isn’t safe from cuts. Films on TV, even foreign ones on cable channels, are regularly snipped and sliced to make the content pristine enough for Indian viewers. The censorship happens quietly and steadily. There are no protests or even debates about this. It’s accepted that it will happen.

At the closing ceremony of the Mumbai Film Festival, the jury president Hugh Hudson condemned the arrest of Iranian filmmakers and extended the international film community’s support to men like Jafar Panahi. News had just started creeping in that Panahi had lost his appeal against a six-year prison sentence that a Tehran court had pronounced last year. In addition to jail time, Panahi faces a 20-year ban on filmmaking, travelling outside Iran and talking to the press. There’s been precious little reaction to the news of Panahi and his sentence in India. Perhaps it’s because we’re still reeling with the excitement of getting to see films that released just weeks ago in America and Europe. Perhaps our film fraternity would rather ignore the issue of censorship and how people fight it because it would then raise the question of what we’re doing to protect our freedom of expression.

When Panahi was first sentenced in December 2010, his response was to make This Is Not A Film and smuggle it out of Iran on a USB stick that was hidden in a cake. The film, which premiered at Cannes, is a look at what Panahi’s life is like as he waits to find out the status of his appeal while under house arrest. In Mumbai, it appears our preferred reaction is to strengthen the illusion that controversies and debates are rewarded here; to lull ourselves into believing no censorship exists.

Deepanjana Pal is a journalist and the author of The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma. She is currently a consulting copy editor at Elle magazine.