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In a country where marital rape is not a legal crime, it took a lot for Smita to escape an abusive marriage. She lives in a one room apartment in Mumbai, earning her living by making imitation mangalsutras (a necklace worn by married women). But the recent tranquility of her life is shaken when the doorbell rings.
Smita finds herself fighting beasts of a different kind as she discovers a strange pre-requisite to renting a house in middle-class Mumbai. Will Smita find her space? Is there any hope for liberation — societal and/or sexual? Will the doorbell ever stop ringing — again and again? Counterfeit Kunkoo isn’t a feisty feminist retort to the deep-seated misogyny that finds its way into everyday life. It is an exploration of the idiosyncrasies that come with it, the battles one must fight, and whether winning or losing those battles matters at all.
We spoke with Reema Sengupta, writer, director, editor and producer of the film, as she shares with us her journey into filmmaking and the efficacy of film as a tool to voice your beliefs and concerns. Counterfeit Kunkoo has also screened at over 100 festivals, from Sundance Film Festival in the USA to Short Shorts Film Festival in Tokyo, Japan, and on top of that, is the winner of an abundance of awards.
What led you onto the path of filmmaking?
I come from very humble beginnings, and I’m sharing this with you because you have seen Counterfeit Kunkoo, and that’s the world my parents grew up in. They were still living in the slums of Mumbai when I was born and we kind of worked our way up and out of that. Growing up, I wanted to do something that would allow me to have a social-political voice, because I found myself being very emotionally overwhelmed by the things happening around me, even if they weren’t happening to me personally. I started thinking about what my medium of choice should be in order to say what I want to say, and through a very objective sense of analysis, I chose film. People are constantly looking at films and videos as a way of validating social behaviour, so it has this amazing way to incite empathy compared to most other mediums.
How significant have your personal experiences been in informing the making of this film?
It was a really important moment in understanding what defines who we are — me and my mum. I grew up in a house with a lot of domestic violence. I was the only child and I remember being as young as five years old, telling my mum she needs to get out of this situation. I grew up in Mumbai and I don’t know if you experience this in your society, but here, a woman choosing to step out of a marriage is not even a thought that they consider. It’s not that it isn’t an option, but it’s almost a form of mental enslavement. For the longest time, my mum just kind of suffered through it, and I was used to being her protector.
The reason why I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend university in London was because my mum chose not to buy a house and used that money to sponsor my education, so my family was still living on rent. Whilst I was there, I remember getting a call from my mum, and she tells me, your father says the lease of the house runs out this week, and after that, I’m on my own, and I need to figure out my own situation. It was so unfair, because she’s the one who’s financially stable and running the house all these years. She’s an educated woman who’s very independent and very strong, but it was just the suddenness of that abandonment that really got us. Luckily, she had the funds to be able to rent a house, so she started the process of looking for a place immediately. But everywhere she went, the first question was: "Is it for a family or is it for a bachelor?" She would tell them: “Me and my my daughter are going to live there,” and they would then ask: “Where’s your husband?” That was the only question anybody was interested in, and I remember feeling so infuriated and helpless about what I could do from so far away. So I just poured it all out in a script and put it away. My mum has managed to find a house since, and after the separation, we’ve just been accelerating and progressing and having a wonderful life together.
When I started to feel myself burning out from commission project after commission project after commission project, I decided that I really needed to do something for myself, and that’s when I picked up the script that I wrote in 2011. I gathered a small crew of family and friends — my mum was producing, I had cousins assistant directing and assistant producing, and others helping out, cooking food. It was four really, really gruelling days and when you are making something on the basis of so many people doing you so many favours, it increases that weight of responsibility manifold. I really felt I had to pull through and do something that is worth the effort of the people who have been involved and the faith that they are showing.
Are there any moments from the filmmaking process that standout to you?
Most of where we were shooting were in fact real spaces, and the house that is the husband’s house is a place where the kindest family lived and they allowed us to shoot there. That home housed a family of four, plus a dog, plus a cat, plus 50 chickens. It was crazy. It was very interesting to see how different the dynamics of shooting in real spaces are compared to a typical shoot location that you can hire, because it’s not about paying a location manager; it’s about entering people’s spaces and being respectful about that and helping them understand our journey and what we’re trying to do.
The house that Smita inhabits after her separation, where families visit to potentially rent, that house belonged to a young woman who lived there with her brother and mother, and it just so happens that her story is so similar to the story of our protagonist. Speaking with her, there was one thing she said that was so striking to me, which is that she doesn’t dress up because if she does, people would think that she was going to meet a lover. She’s given up that entire aspect of her identity. It was heartbreaking, but so poignant that her space is what we showed.
Also, whilst shooting the final scene, I closed the set and only had the female crew around. It was about six women getting the scene shot, spending 15 minutes trying to figure out the correct hand placement of such an activity. That was the first time I realised we’ve never spoken about it, as if it were a taboo! We then realised there is no consensus. But that was a very heart-warming exercise to have these women come together and figure out how to depict it.
Did you and your crew encounter any setbacks?
On the second day of the shoot, we were shooting the first scene in the hospital and we had a hospital lined up, gotten the necessary permission, and done the checks. We arrive on the morning of the shoot, we start setting up and suddenly, a man barges in and is like shut everything, shut everything, and we’re like what do you mean? And apparently the person who had given us permission to shoot in the hospital didn’t have the authority to give us the permission to shoot and there was apparently a longer procedure and it was a government based procedure and it was a Sunday so the offices were shut and there was no way for us to manage to get that permission on that day so we were of course trying to convince that person to let us carry on and we didn’t have the money to do another day’s shoot and that was it, you know? So our crew split up into multiple teams - three went off and started scouting for locations, private hospitals and places like that, and I sat behind my art director on her scooter and went to the prop shop and basically picked up everything we could possibly pick up to make any space look more like a hospital. And then finally, my uncle managed to speak to his son’s ex school and managed to get us one little corridor and we kind of did it up and we shot there.
The set up of the scene is definitely convincing enough, and if I remember correctly, the repetitive rhythm of a fan that’s very stark.
That was a really conscious decision — the motif of the fan — because it appears in two places that you see in the film. One is, of course, the hospital where she’s laying on the bed and the only thing she can really see and concentrate on is the fan, and this loud, worrying, jarring sound of it, and the next time we see it is when she’s back in his house and we understand why that fan was so jarring to her, because that’s probably the only thing she was seeing while she was being assaulted. It has always fascinated me how even the most mundane everyday objects can take on such a menacing quality because of the traumatic associations.
The film has done so well. You’ve screened at a variety of festivals and it’s won so many awards. Have you observed any differences in the way the film has been received by the local audience versus the international audience?
In terms of reception, it’s been pretty universal. I was initially afraid, because so much of the conversation has been really culturally specific and a lot of the humour is very culturally specific as well, so I was concerned about it being viewed as a very local film. But by the end of the Sundance screening, so many people shared that they really resonated with the film and in fact, the one comment that I remember came from a woman who shared how her mother experienced housing discrimination of a similar kind in New Jersey in the 70’s.
The first time we screened with an Indian audience was at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) and there, I remember, a woman who came to me and said: “I’m starting over again after 18 years of a bad marriage and watching your film made me feel like I’ll be just fine.” That was such a big moment for me.
One other reaction that I had from the Indian diaspora was by a young Indian woman who said: “I have never, ever seen the visual of a woman in a sari touching herself. This visual has never existed. It’s so taboo and it’s so frowned upon that it hasn’t even existed in our psyche. I was taken aback when I saw it but I also thought: Why hasn't this been normalised? Why is this such an anomaly?”
What are the roots of the biases propagated by the characters we see in the film? Is it a matter of problematic policies?
There is absolutely no policy. In fact, there is a rule that says people are not allowed to discriminate against tenants on the basis of any of these factors, so it’s completely a societal issue. Most of the estate agents featured in the film are real estate agents, and when we were telling them about the story, their reactions were, oh, so she pretends to be married? It’s definitely something they experience a lot, but yet they still didn’t understand what was wrong with what they were doing. It’s completely a moral policing exercise. I wouldn’t put it on the real estate agents entirely, as they are at the end of the day working on commissions and working as per what the landlords want and are demanding. Especially in Mumbai, which is a place that experiences a lot of migration so people need houses a lot more. It’s not just about restrictions towards women as well. A lot of people who work in the media industry find it really hard to get houses, people with pets find it harder to get houses, there are certain societies where people don’t eat vegetarian food, they find it harder to get houses.