![]() |
Leslee Udwin |
Leslee Udwin, the BAFTA award-winning producer of East is East, and the Producer / Director of India's Daughter, talks about her work, her journey as a filmmaker and her all new initiative, Think Equal.
Tell us a bit about your life - your childhood, growing
years, education and career motivations.
I
was born in Israel. When I was 3, a film crew shot part of a movie in the house
next door to mine. My mother tells me that I knocked on the door, disturbed
their filming, and asked for a job. The cameraman ‘adopted’ me and I was
allowed to watch shooting. The dye was cast; from that time I was determined to
be an actor. When I was 9, my father took the family to South Africa. I went to
school and university there – and did a Drama Honours Degree at Johannesburg’s
main university. Much about life in South Africa was shocking for a young mind
that had come into a rigid system run on the bizarre notion that skin colour is
the determinant of value and of one’s fate in life. I remember being utterly
shocked one day, sitting in the tiny box room of our maid, Elizabeth, as I
asked her questions about where her family was and why she doesn’t live with
them. They were in a rural area so many miles away that she could only go home
to see her children twice a year. In 1976, while I was at university, the
brutal white South African police force slaughtered unarmed young black
children and youth in Soweto’s ‘township’, to smash riots. This left an
indelible imprint of anger in my heart – and an understanding at a young age
that life is brutal, unjust and unfair. The Indian caste system is no different
from the system of apartheid which has now been dismantled in South Africa –
and yet the world turns a blind eye to India’s systemised inequity. I simply
have to ask - why is that? Why are there no sanctions against India, as there
were against South Africa, (and successfully so), to encourage it to abandon its immoral and
despicable caste system, which dooms vast swathes of its population to poverty,
abuse, and lack of opportunity?
I
was determined to study drama at university. My father, a die-hard patriarch,
decided law was what I was born for, and refused to support me financially
unless I studied law. So I worked my way through university. I had graduated
from my high school with 6 As and a B, and had been head girl at the school,
and so I managed to persuade the principal to allow me to teach the first
lesson of the morning, so I could earn some money. I would rush off to
university after my early morning teaching job, and just make it in time for my
lectures. When I left University, there were only two theatres in the whole
country I could work in, because they were the only ‘multi-racial theatres’ in
South Africa. I went to work at one them, the Space Theatre in Cape Town. A
play I was in there was banned – ironically enough it was a play about
censorship. I played the title role in the Duchess of Malfi and would, in all
likelihood, have had a great career there, but I couldn't stay. I was torn
between political morality and personal ambition. I would hand out leaflets on
‘blacks only’ station platforms, where I ran the risk of arrest, and I realised
that although the theatre I worked in was non-segregated, audiences were still
predominantly white only in practice, and it seemed to me, impossible to
influence outcomes in that fascist-run society by working in theatre. And yet
that (the theatre) was then my first and
only love. So I left South Africa at 20, and moved to London. I had to fund my
own way because my father was still refusing to support me if I continued to
“waste my life” as an actress. My need to prove that I was right and he was
wrong, and my need to make my own living did motivate me in a good way. But I
always felt residual resentment and disappointed at my father’s limited vision
and lack of emotional support for me.
I
had a great theatre career in London, playing leading roles at the National
Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Royal Court, amongst others. I was
privileged enough to act with amazing British actors – Alan Rickman, Harriet
Walter and Sir Alec Guinness among others. And then one day, acting wasn’t
enough for me. Motivated by a real life struggle I had with a psychopath
criminal landlord, during which I and a small group of courageous tenants
managed to set a precedent in the High Court of England, I decided to become a
producer. It was the need to communicate an important story that motivated the
change. I decided to turn the real life
struggle and its victorious, optimistic outcome, into a film. I wrote a
treatment and sent it to a producer whose work I admired. He agreed to make it
for BBC Screen 2, and I worked with the writer on the screenplay, and watched
and learnt the ropes of producing. The first film I produced alone was “Who
Bombed Birmingham?”, a campaigning film starring John Hurt, for Granada / HBO,
which directly led to the release of 6
innocent Irishmen from 17 years of wrongful imprisonment. And my first feature film was “East is East”
(starring Om Puri). That is when my love affair with India began.
I
became a director for India’s Daughter, and that film, in turn, has motivated
me to now become a human rights activist. So that’s 4 careers in one pretty
exhausting lifetime so far. Thank heavens my husband, Kim, is a wonderful enlightened
man who understands that love and marriage are a partnership in which one
partner supports the other, and there should be no gender lines drawn in who
does what, including staying home to take care of our two kids.
What inspired your decision to shoot India's Daughter? What was the emotional
and personal thought process behind the decision?
The motivation was entirely emotional,
and visceral. If I had thought rationally about it, I think I would have not
gone the distance. By pure coincidence, about 2 weeks before the news of the
gang rape of Jyoti Singh had hit the TV screens around the world, I had said to
my husband in the kitchen one evening while we were (both!) chopping vegetables,
that I felt it was time I made another film that changed things – like The Birmingham
Six film and East is East had done. And I did say “and this time it has to be
about women”. When I heard the news on the morning of December 17, 2012, my stomach
turned, of course, but I didn’t think “oh this is a case I must make a film
about”. I just thought: “here we are again, another brutal gang rape reported
somewhere in the world – how on earth will this relentless cycle stop?” And
then, something utterly amazing happened over the ensuing days.
Men and women
in vast numbers poured out onto the streets, and kept on going for days and
weeks. I had never seen anything like this degree of passion and activism and
commitment for women’s rights. When the government stupidly decided to crack
down on these peaceful protesters, (as patriarchal governments tend to do when
they fear unrest and see challenges to their failings), with lathi charges and
water canons and tear gas shells, I knew I had to go and make a film about this.
I fell in love with those protesters. I believed they heralded a real change on
the horizon, and that this was like “an Arab spring” for gender equality. I was
rashly optimistic of course, but that’s what took me to India to make the film,
a desire to amplify and support the voices of those protesters. It was my way
of joining the protests. The truth is that if those protests had happened in
any other country about any other case that involved a violation of women’s or
girls’ rights, I would have gone to that country to make the film about that
case, and that protest. What is so utterly ironic about the ban is that the
motivation to make the film was in praise of India’s men and women who led the
world by example in those protests.
Once I decided, I called my family
together in the living room for a family meeting and announced that I wanted to
go to India and make this important film which I believed would help women
campaign for their rights and to stop violence against them. I particularly
addressed my youngest child, my daughter Maya, who was 13 at the time and I
knew needed a mother at her side. I said: “Maya, you are the most important
person in my life and I recognise you are at the age where you need me. If you
tell me not to go, because you need me, I won’t go.” Before she answered, I
added: “But you need to also know that if I don’t go, I will find it hard to
look myself fin the mirror, feeling as strongly as I do, and not taking action.”
Pure emotional blackmail, I see in retrospect, and very unfair. But Maya
insisted that I go and was,and continues to be, hugely supportive throughout
the 3 years I have been more absent, than there for her.
What did you think of the reactions you received to the film, particularly from
India?
I was extremely shocked and hurt by
them. They seemed to be so utterly illogical, misguided, and simply wrong.
There were certain shocks I don’t think I’ll ever recover form: being told by
one of the respected Indian so-called feminists that “a group of 20 Indian
feminists (including Vrinda Grover, Indira Jaisingh, Kavita Krishnan, Devki
Jai, Urvashi Buthalia) had called for the ban, and that without them alerting
the Home Ministry to stop the broadcast, the film may not have been banned at
all. Then, finding the Home Minister so utterly badly informed by his research
team about my prison permissions, and seeing hysterical MPs in the Lok Sabha
screaming about the gori's “conspiracy to shame India” and how I was going to
“decimate India’s tourist industry”. Then finding nasty trolls, mostly men,
from India sending me tweets and FB messages like “white bitch you deserve to
be raped...” It was hugely disappointing and dispiriting. I had already had a
pretty bleak view of the human heart and what it’s capable of during my 31
hours of interviews with the rapists and, perhaps even worse, my 9 hours of
interviews with their lawyers… That would have been quite enough depression and
disappointed in humanity to last a lifetime without the circus of responses
from the Indian government, feminists, and trolls… But having said that, the
vast and overwhelming majority of reactions from India were hugely
supportive and continue to be. Certainly
the Indians living abroad are completely enlightened and supportive – with only
a tiny minority feeling defensive and that they have to defend their country’s
image.
Shooting a film that had so many nuances and elements to it - particularly the
emotions and the raw pain of just how terrible the incident was - must have
evoked your own pain. How did you deal with that challenge?
In truth I don’t think I have fully
dealt with it yet. I have been going non-stop for over 3 years now – sleeping
very little (3 hours a night for the 2 years while making the film and not a
lot more now). Straight after the film I started campaigning on the road
relentlessly, then started an NGO and a very ambitious global initiative THINK EQUAL (please click
on the link and find out more about it and support it ). This is a really new
and innovative idea, which demands a system change in the way we educate
children. And it’s an idea whose time has definitely come. In a nutshell it’s
to educate children’s hearts and not just their heads. I believe it is the only
solution to the cycle of violence across our world). So I haven’t time to deal
with the psychological pain or trauma of what I learned on my filming journey.
At the time, I seemed able to deal it with it (for the most part), because I was
getting to understand the reasons why this happens. When I sat with those
rapists for 31 hours, including one who had raped a five year old girl, I
couldn’t feel anger (which is what I was expecting to feel). I was expecting to
feel anger, primarily because I myself had been raped at 18, and I thought the
trauma would well up inside me. But it didn’t. Anger didn’t surface. It was not
an appropriate emotion given what was so clearly laid out before me, which was
that these men had been programmed to think they as they think. They had been
handed a set of attitudes towards women so clear, so utterly black and white
and confidently held, that they may as well have been handed rape manuals at
the age of 12. And there were no interventions – no one to tell them that a
girl is actually of value, and wanted in this world, and worthy of respect and
education. Where were they to learn that from? The examples they saw all around
them, the hard evidence, was that girls were unwelcome burdens, their fathers
beat their mothers, their brothers beat their wives, How do we expect them to
behave when they’re taught such things by their culture and society? We are to
blame for their attitudes and their actions which have been informed by those
attitudes. No amount of trying to distance ourselves form them by calling them
monster and meting out the death penalty to them, can change that fact. I did
have one major breakdown in my Delhi hotel room, not long after I had
interviewed the rapist of the 5 year old. Pressure at the time was huge and I woke up in a total panic, sweating and
shaking. I thought I either needed to get into a hospital or to get home. I
called home to ask my husband for help and to book me on a flight back I really
wanted to end the nightmare and difficulty of doing this film. Luckily my
daughter answered the phone and talked me down off the panic attack and said:
“Mummy you are not coming home because I and my generation of girls are relying
on you.” She was thirteen and a half when she said that. I stayed and finished
the film.
What kind of challenges / backlashes did you face after the movie released? How
did you deal with them?
The first I heard about the ban, I was
in India, cutting the Indian version of the film for NDTV. I had to, for
example, remove the name “Jyoti Singh” from the film because Indian law
prohibits the name of a rape survivor or victim being named. And I was there to
publicise the film for its NDTV screening on the March 8 – International
Women’s Day. The first I heard about the ban was at a press screening we were
holding for media. A young journalist came up to me and showed me a mobile
phone text she had just got form a colleague: “the film has been banned and
there’s a warrant out for the filmmaker’s arrest.” She warned me that I should
leave the country. I started phoning all the lawyers I knew and had been
working with in India (7 of them), asking advice. Every one of them, except the
last one I called, said: “go straight to the airport and leave, don’t even
collect your suitcase.” I kept calling another and another because I wanted to
hear different advice. My instincts were to stay. I was appalled, Howdare they ban the film and arrest me? On
what grounds? I had done nothing wrong and I should stand my ground. The 7th
lawyer said something different. He said: “Do not go to the airport.” At last I
thought the advice I want to hear. But then he continued: “Drive to Nepal and
leave from there. They'll be waiting for you at the airport.” My editor, who
was with me, always loyally at my side,
was weeping and terrified, begging me to leave. I decided to stay. My
flight which had originally been booked was leaving 26 hours hence. I thought
that in the meanwhile I would go on NDTV panels and defend the film and
challenge their decision to ban it and point out how wrong they were. I also
thought that if I were to be brought to court ,I might need to prove that I
didn’t try “to evade justice” by leaving earlier than I had originally booked
to leave before the ban. I didn't tell my family. When I left the next evening,
on my original booking, there were crews outside the airport departures doors.
I covered my head in my scarf, put sunglasses on and went a long way round
through arrivals, in order to evade the crews. I was later told that the police
had arrived with pictures of me at the house I had been staying in, half an
hour after I had left.
As a filmmaker, you are, undoubtedly a storyteller. What goes into your way of
telling a story?
Well, each story is unique and will
require a different way of telling it so that its compelling truth emerges in
the best way. Ultimately I am most fascinated by what makes people tick and
seeing things from their point of view, taking their perspectives as aspects of
the truth, is what film particularly does best. It takes the viewer on an
empathetic journey in which we see the world through the eyes of the ‘other’ or
several ‘others’. There is no greater act of generosity than doing
that. Seeing the world through another’s eyes and experience.
When I set out to make India’s Daughter
I was very thoughtful about what the film was, its purpose, its imperatives. I
had never directed before, and so I needed to be as clear as possible before I
set off as to what my actual purpose was
in making the film. I knew I needed to do 3 things: 1) Make a campaigning film
that put the impassioned protests at its centre – as the recurring heartbeat of
the film. So that the film would be a campaigning film which would stir awareness of the issue of
violence against women globally and inspire people to protest, like the Indian
protesters had so admirably done. 2) My early research into all that had been
written and broadcast about the young woman who had been gang-raped and
murdered, made it clear that there was nothing at all, apart from one sentence.
We only knew that she was “a 23 year old medical student who had gone to see a
movie with a friend at night”. She was reduced to a statistic, without a name.
I found that hard to accept. What were her dreams, aspirations? Her experiences
and thoughts about women in her society? Who was she? What would she likely
have gone on to do in life had she not been so callously violated and murdered?
I knew I wanted the film to be a tribute to her and for us to get to know who
she was and whom we had lost through this brutal act. And 3) I knew I had to
interview those rapists and find out what goes on in the heads of men who do
this? Without understanding them, there’s no hope of changing them. I also knew
that I didn’t want to be in the film, either as interviewer or narrator. I
wanted the direct participants in the story to tell the story from their
viewpoints. This was partly a recognition of the fact that I was ‘an outsider’
in this culture and could observe it and examine it, but certainly didn't want
to comment on it in the course of the film. And partly because I actually hate
it when the filmmaker inserts him or herself into the documentary as though
they are remotely interesting – it detracts from the story and I think is kind
ofarrogant. I also hate it when a
narrator leads an audience by the nose and tells it what to think and fills in
bits of the story… I favour films that compel an audience to watch them, that
tell their story in an exciting and powerful way. And since I wanted to make a
campaigning film, it was also important that it should be tight and focused and
emotionally involving. In any event, I have feature film or drama sensibilities,
because those are my ‘default instincts’. I worked very hard on the music, for
instance, with the composer, searching
for months for the right piece of music that accurately expressed each theme.
In particular the music which was the theme for the rapists – which needed to
be the deepest most sonorous sound ‘of the depths of pity’ for the world that
contains these men. Because that was what I felt when I was with them. The
composer Krsna worked tirelessly and loyally to get the music right, He is so
talented and was absolutely committed to this film. As is Anuradha Singh, the
editor who gave her all to this work, and Riddhi Jha, my angel associate
producer. All dedicated, talented, brilliant and amazing people.
What do you see as some of the biggest factors that continue to encourage
gender-based violence? Why, in your opinion, haven't we been effective in
addressing the issue so far?
Socio-cultural programming is what
continues to allow gender-based violence to thrive unabated. Culture is much
more powerful than law. The laws are there but the culture often prevents their
implementation. Take one example: it is illegal to give and receive dowry. A fairly
recent protective law. Why? Because dowry was leading to violence against
brides – to what were called “dowry deaths”.
There were cases where the bridegroom’s family weren’t satisfied with
gifts from the bride’s family, so they’d kill her and take another wife for
their son, with another dowry….. Now that it’s been made illegal, has dowry
stopped? Absolutely not. The majority of Indians continue to give and take
dowry, This makes them criminals who should be arrested and imprisoned.
Culture, mindset, is the biggest factor and indeed the root cause of
gender-based, and indeed any other kindof discriminatory violence (racial,
religious…)
We haven’t been effective to date
because we are dealing with it in a very short-sighted way, We are looking to
alleviate the symptoms and deal with fallout after the event, instead of looking
to eradicate theroot cause. We are bandaging the wounds instead of operating on
the tumour that causes the wound. We need to focus on PREVENTION. And there is
only one way to prevent this cycle of violence and discrimination – education.
But it’s not ‘education’ as we know it – it’s neither “access to education” nor
the kind of education we’re so obsessed with: numeracy, literacy and test
results. I am talking about the kind of education that teaches values and
emotional intelligence, empathy, critical thinking, perspective taking and
conflict resolution…. And these can’t be taught by ‘instructions’ – in other
words it’s not about telling kids “you must be respectful”. They have to be
taught experientially – and they have to practise this. Particular in the early
years when the child’s attitudes and character are forming at an incredibly
rapid rate. And when attitudes and behaviour can still be influenced to the
good. Mandela said: “children are not born hating. And Ifthey can learn to
hate, then they can be taught to love”. Aristotle said: “Education of the head
without education of the heart, is no education at all”. These are 2 very
inspiring quotes for me and were instrumental in the foundational thinking
behind THINK EQUAL.
There is a lot of talk about masculinities of violence and toxic masculinities
that are explained as underlying the phenomenon of gender based violence. What
do you think of it? Would you believe that toxic masculinities underlie the
phenomenon of GBV?
What underlies ALL violence in the
world, be it gender-based, religious, racial or other, is a discriminatory mind-set
which ascribes lesser or no value to the ‘other’ in each case. It’s utterly simple: if you have no respect
for and place no value on a living creature because she is a girl, or he is an
infidel, or they are of the wrong tribe, or it is ‘just a cow’ then you are
disposed to treat it as a ‘thing’ and commit violence upon it. The ‘cow’ is sacred in India, but in the rest
of the world it is treated as a commodity to be encaged, raped, inseminated,
milked, and slaughtered for the trillion dollar beef industry. If you look at
how cows are treated by us in the beef industry, it is easy to see how mind-set
informs casual violence. The same is true with people. When a young boy is raised seeing evidence
all around him that a girl is ‘less important’ than he is, that she is destined
to become a domestic slave one day, to take care of him, feed him, clean his
house and bear and take care of his children. There is a sense of entitlement
and power and superiority that make violence against women and girls easy. What
are toxic masculinities? They are the expression of a mindset that has existed
since time immemorial that believes that men are superior and should be the
decision makers, the rulers. Until that changes., until and unless we have
gender equality, violence against women and girls will continue.
What are you working on currently? How can young women world over join your
efforts in telling truths that the world must hear?
I have been a
filmmaker for some 20 years. I love
filmmaking. It’s my passion and I believe with all my heart that film is a
powerful tool for change. However, India’s Daughter gave me such blindingly
clear insights into what the problem is – globally – that it also gave me a
completely clear view of hat the solution is. I can’t now just turn my
attention to another subject and make another film about something else, when I
know what action needs to be taken. SO, uncomfortable and inconvenient as it is
to me, I have now become a human rights activist. I have started an NGO and
have committed myself to THINK EQUAL. With my brilliant colleague, Education
Director, Helen Lumgair, and with a global committee of world experts in social
emotional learning, we are designing, constructing and delivering a tangible
curriculum for the Early Years (ages 3-7) of lesson plans, concrete exercises
and activities (160 such lesson plans a year for 3 year olds next year, for
example) – which will be delivered over
4 x half hour lessons per week. We have pilots committed (including in India)
across 14 countries. Please click on this link if you’re interesting in reading
more.
How
can people join our efforts? Well, in 2 significant ways: 1) They can donate on
this link and they can fund raise.- encourage their friends to donate. You’ll be amazed
how impossible it is to fund start-ups through foundations which profess to
fund the sort of work we’re doing. If people give up 3 coffees a month, and
pledge the price of those 3 coffees to THINK EQUAL – they’d be supporting world
change directly. All donations go to the direct costs of building the
curriculum. and 2) They can advocate for THINK EQUAL amongst parents and
journalists, opinion shapers and politicians. We should all be demanding that
we widen out the education of our children to enable them to lead productive,
peaceful, respectful and empowered lives.
To watch India's Daughter on Demand, click here. All rental fees for India's Daughter also go to fund the education campaign.
To watch India's Daughter on Demand, click here. All rental fees for India's Daughter also go to fund the education campaign.