To hear Shobhana Padinjhattil, tucked away in her office room at the entrance of the library, talk about realising a dream she had nursed for 25 years is as heartening as it is touching. She had, from the days she began watching world cinema as a university student, imagined making a film of her own. She wrote down ideas, stories, and whole scripts, only to stash them and get back to the realities of life. Shobhana, coming from a Dalit family in Thrissur, reluctantly took up a course in library science and climbed one long step after another to be in a position to fund her own film. She, who has been the state librarian in Kerala for 10 years, is now also the proud director of Girlfriends – her debut that has been chosen for the coveted International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) to be held in December this year.
That’s the festival that allowed her to dream to be a filmmaker, she says, having been a regular visitor since its first edition in the late 1990s. When she came to Thiruvananthapuram for her Masters, the IFFK was her greatest attraction. Even when she got a job at the Agricultural University on a good pay scale, she dropped it to remain in Thiruvananthapuram, just so that she could be where the IFFK is.
“I began watching world cinema before coming to Thiruvananthapuram – in my days at Kerala Varma College – attending screenings by film societies. Cinema became a passion,” Shobhana says.
The job of a librarian, financial issues, and the constraints faced by a woman in a strange city kept her from her dream for too long. Shobhana filled those years by watching films in plenty, reading, writing. “Now I have taken money out of my Provident Fund to finance the film, and found time on my off days to go to locations in and around Thiruvananthapuram to make the film,” she says.
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