The sky is full of mysteries; with the twinkling stars and the beautiful moon. But, scientific investigation revealed that stars do not twinkle nor does the moon look beautiful...

According to women in cinema, the harassment starts from the very inception.” So begins the Hema Committee report, which was made public last month.

Ever since, the Malayalam film industry has been in a state of churn.

First, the Bengali actress Sreelekha Mitra levelled charges of sexual harassment against director Ranjith, and then more and more women started coming out with their personal experiences of sexual exploitation by industry bigwigs. One by one, the Mohanlals and Mammoottys started to quit the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists that was formed in 1994. Just a few days ago, sexual assault allegations have surfaced against actor Nivin Pauly no less.

Now, it so happens that four of the most successful Malayalam films of 2024 — Bramayugam, Manjummel Boys, Aadujeevitham: The Goat Life and Aavesham — did not feature any female character worth the note. Social media was rife with comments suggesting a “misogynistic industry” had moved on from writing questionable female characters to writing women out of their scripts.

Aavesham film

In the 2017 paper “The Many Misogynies of Malayalam Cinema”, Meena T. Pillai writes about New Wave cinema of the 1970s, which had underplayed the masculinity myth and revealed it as fragile and vulnerable, something that post-1990s Malayalam cinema dismantled. Pillai, who is director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, writes about the industry’s “over investment in stardom”, starting with Mohanlal and Mammootty in the 1990s, and the role of the media in “selectively projecting and promoting popular cinema, using stardom’s masculinist and capitalist spectacles”.

And yet, those in the know say that Malayalam films with progressive female
characters — when they have been made — have been known to do well at the box office. This year’s releases, Premalu and Ullozhukku, both featuring strong female protagonists did well.

Aavesham film

Deedi Damodaran, a screenwriter who works in Malayalam cinema and one of the founding members of Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), says, “Kerala is supposed to have the highest literacy rate in India. The women here are all literate. But in the last general elections, we did not send a single woman to Parliament. This is an extension of the films released at that time. This state doesn’t feel that keeping women away is something to be ashamed of; they think that is just the order of the day.”

The WCC was formed in 2017 after a prominent actress spoke up about the sexual assault on her person. A group of 18 women from the Malayalam film industry came together, supported her demand for justice and formed this collective. It is after they presented their demands to the state that the committee under retired judge K. Hema was formed to investigate the working conditions of women in the Kerala film industry.

Manjummel Boys. Sourced by The Telegraph

Deedi knows of the four films from 2024 that do not feature women. She half-jokes, “These films had been in the works when the industry was anticipating the Hema Committee report. Perhaps, it made sense for them to keep the ‘troublemakers’ at bay.”

Prathap Joseph, who is known as the torchbearer of radical parallel Malayalam cinema but prefers to identify himself as an independent filmmaker, says, “Malayalam cinema has always been men’s cinema. P.K. Rosy, a Dalit woman, was beaten up for playing the female lead in the first Malayalam movie Vigathakumaran.” He continues, “These films without women are no coincidence. They are a sign of how Malayalam cinema and Kerala life look upon women. The same is validated by the Hema Committee report.”

Manjummel Boys

Malayalam actress Maala Parvathy is more hopeful than the two veterans. She says, “These stories are intertwined with our society. In Kerala, systemic misogyny is there but we are also fighting against it.” She adds, “The fact that the Malayalam industry even allowed such a report to come out reflects our progressive nature. And it is bound to have a ripple effect across other film industries.”