Engendering a Female Gaze: A Filmmaker’s Journey

Engendering a Female Gaze: A Filmmaker’s Journey

A Syncretic Upbringing

Starting from her school years, Roohi Dixit had a proclivity for the arts. As the daughter of two professors, raised in an idyllic agricultural campus in Hisar, Haryana, she was drawn to debating, writing and daydreaming. Her father taught veterinarian physiology and her mother, Hindi and Sanskrit. Both parents were avid readers and travellers. Music and avant-garde films, books and artworks imbued their home with an electric energy.

“My entire family was crazy about films,” she recalls. Her parents encouraged her to watch parallel cinema, which was just coming of age in the 70s. Many of these films were beamed on Doordarshan, between election campaigns. Soaking up the works of makers like Shyam Benegal and Sai Paranjpye, she learned to wrestle with complex human emotions. With nuance, and grey zones, and multiple viewpoints.

Moreover each Friday, her family headed to the single-screen theatre on campus. At the time, many of the films might have been black-and-white. But watching stories sizzle across screens, amidst a gaggle of professors and friends, was always magical.

Though Hisar wasn’t a large city, the campus attracted scholars from across the world. It was small enough so that everyone knew everyone. But the diversity of people gave it a cosmopolitan feel, and a culture more syncretic than of other small cities.

The move from her schooling there to college at Miranda House, a highly renowned women’s college in the nation’s capital, did not require bridging any cultural distance. She fitted right in to the charged academic setting, where many hierarchies (starting, quite naturally, with patriarchy) were being dissected.

Philosophy, Art, Cinema

Choosing to pursue Philosophy Honors – with a curriculum that ranged over Indian and Western wrangles in the discipline – she continued to foster her artistic impulses. Reflecting on her choice later, she realizes that it had been immensely character-shaping as an 18-year-old to encounter Descartes, existentialism and other social upheavals that revolved around deep questions.

She already had a sense that she would gravitate towards writing or films, but in the meanwhile, she wished to bolster her understanding of the human condition. She joined a choreography group and Spic Macay – a non-profit that promotes classical Indian culture among young people – while also writing fiction and screenplays. Delhi teemed with film festivals, so she often ventured to Pragathi Maidan to watch works by masters.

Soon after Miranda, she joined Symbiosis at Pune, for a Master’s in Mass Communications. Fortunately for her, the course involved trips to the Film and Television Institute (FTII), for a film critique class. She wasn’t sure yet if she wanted to make films or stick to writing screenplays. After graduation, she worked at Lintas as a copywriter, and inside the firm, she sensed that she was drawn to the alchemy of words and images. Rather than just words.

Journeying Into Filmmaking

Dixit found Delhi alienating. She had always lived in bucolic campus-type spaces, and the sprawling capital didn’t feel like home. When she relocated to Maa Bozell in Bangalore, she felt more at ease. She also met a host of amazing people, including her art partner, who became her husband.

From Bozell, she moved to Pratibha Advertising, where it became clear that her passion lay in filmmaking, rather than in writing. To hone her production skills, she joined Trends Ad Film Makers, where she gleaned lessons from stalwarts like VK Prakash and NV Prakash

She mastered the intricacies of different film cameras, 35 and 16 mm and the grammar that stitched images into gripping narratives. During this time, she also met Ziba Bhagwagar, a writer, director, and editor. Together, they co-wrote their first feature film, Freaky Chakra, starring Deepti Naval and Ranvir Shorey. The film still summons fond memories: “We were all so young in our 20s, so that was a very exciting time.”

Founding Zero Rules

After Freaky Chakra, she and Ziba wished to broaden their horizons. While they intended to keep up their links with advertising – relishing the creative challenges and earning potential – they also wanted to create longer format films. “Not just fiction, but also non-fiction. And experimental films, because our lives are not very linear in that sense.”

They decided to found their own production house, Zero Rules. To forge an open playing field for ideas they had been tossing about over the years. Their venture, established after a conversation at Koshy’s Parade Cafe, was one of the few women-run film production houses then. Koshy’s became a central meeting point for their ideation sessions, as well as a venue for casting. Friends from theatre groups helped bring concepts to life.

Starting out with minimal funds, they rolled their earnings on to the next project and the next: “There was always this unwritten rule that Ziba and I would never take our fees until the people that we were working with were all paid and all accounts settled,” Roohi recalls, of the early days.

Kickstarting a Longer Film

By around 2010, there had been changes in their personal lives. Dixit had become a mother in 2004, Ziba had married and moved to Mumbai. Both continued to execute film projects, traveling to various locales. But larger existential questions had started rearing their heads. What was their purpose? Who were they, at this point? Was there any meaning to all this? “At least in my heart, it was very strongly brewing at that point,” Dixit says.

She noticed, that each time three or four women gathered, stories emerged that seemed to dredge up smaller and larger questions. She had always felt that such conversations needed to be documented.

With these thoughts buzzing in her head while chatting with a friend from Canada, she picked up the camera. They decided to create a pilot centred around conversations with women. Friends agreed to participate. They had sparked off a fascinating “quest to understand who we are.” “We” referred to urban Indian women. Especially women born into generations that were promised more freedom, but were still sandwiched between tradition and modernity.

Finding Eight Voices

Besides the 2012 gang rape and murder (Nirbhaya) had brought a consciousness among all women, that no one, privileged or otherwise, was completely safe. With an appreciation for how much previous generations had wrestled with intractable systems, and how all women had been moulded by complex forces, she set out to find voices that would represent their variegated makeup.

Leveraging Facebook, which was just getting off the ground in India then, she gathered names and reached out to a few. The research took nearly two years, sieving through various stories. Eventually, she settled on eight distinct voices – ranging from Rekha Menon, the Chairperson and Senior Managing Director of Accenture to Preeti Shenoy, the bestselling author of Life is What You Make It and other books; from Sapna Bhavnani, the hair stylist turned filmmaker to Shabnam Virmani, a spiritual Sufi singer and filmmaker; from Anusha Yadav, a photographer and founder of The Indian Memory Project and Shilo Shiv Suleman, an award-winning artist to Swati Bhattacharya, Chief Creative Officer at FCB and Vidya Pai, LGBT activist and Partner at Big Straw.

Shooting “Scattered Windows, Connected Doors”

Once the project got off the ground, the team had to work really hard and at a frantic pace. Their subjects, after all, were dispersed around the country, each with a busy work schedule and intense personal life. Somehow everything fell into place: “It’s difficult to explain how and when all the women came together, but it happened very rapidly,” Dixit says.

Shooting across Mumbai, Varanasi, Delhi and Bangalore, with subjects who were often traveling themselves, required intense coordination.

Dixit admits that she picked eight exceptional women who were authentic on camera, open about wins and vulnerabilities. They were adept at framing responses to Roohi’s questions that tapped into complex facets of life and identity. “I think everybody was united in the quest to answer certain questions and very honestly.”

The Art of Editing

The whole project took about a year and a half to complete. As a matter of principle, Zero Rules used an all-women crew. There was, as Dixit saw it, no other way to explore the female gaze.

After shooting, their lengthy reels required careful excisions. Fortunately, for Roohi, a friend from Miranda House, Priyanjana Dutta, also a filmmaker, had landed in the city. Roohi, Ziba and Priyanjana spent several days at the studio, watching and re-watching their footage. Until they had honed their sharply-crafted end result.

Films not only affect actors, subjects and viewers. But also, unsurprisingly, filmmakers. Dixit says: “You take in all this information and you sit with yourself. We would often sit together later in the evening, have a drink, sometimes over a meal or a cup of coffee and we would deep dive more and more inside ourselves.”

The Film’s Impact

Eventually, the film won accolades from viewers and critics across the globe. Admitted into many prestigious national and international film festivals, the work stirred responses from women in Italy, or Australia, or Africa. As Roohi and Ziba agreed, their film was about choice. About choices made by women, or foisted on them. “The central idea that we should all have the luxury of choice, that’s something that resonated with everybody across geographies.”

They have recently put it out for free viewing on YouTube for a limited period. But they don’t want the film to be consumed like other content. They wish for it to be appreciated inside groups, at private events, or even in public spaces, where folks can garner takeaways. It’s been ten years since the film was released, and even in 2023, women’s issues across the globe continue to ricochet between gains and backslides.

Current and Future Projects

Since then, Zero Rules has also worked on Spiralling into Desire. The film revolves around Brinda Jacob-Janvrin, an authentic movement practitioner. It’s a collaborative project, that combines movement and film. Eventually, they hope to extend this into a full-length documentary and host special outreach programs with embodiment practice workshops conducted by Brinda.

Roohi and Ziba are also planning an anthology fiction series.

Advice to Aspiring Filmmakers

Her advice to young filmmakers is to engage deeply with the world before picking up a camera. “Get out on the streets, go to markets, talk to people, watch things.” She believes even sitting by a window and watching the world is not a waste of time. But one has to do this sans devices to get an unfiltered view of reality. 

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