VICE Meets Leena Yadav

Film director Leena Yadav's third film is a complex ride that will take you several laps around all of the ups and downs of your emotional rollercoaster. Believe me: these are two hours that will make you cry, laugh, scream and feel weirdly proud of being human. I know I did. Parched is one of those films that stays with you for several days afterwards: you'll find yourself thinking about the characters and the different scenes completely at random.

In Parched, the audience is given a unique and colorful insight into life on the Indian countryside. Described as a "paradoxal celebration of life under difficult circumstances that creates both anger and happiness" by the Stockholm International Film Festival, who awarded Parched with the Stockholm Impact Award, the film is a breakdance all over all aspects of the emotional spectrum, to say the least. In the film, we meet three women with very different lives who are connected by a strong friendship and their zest for life. Throughout their respective journeys, they're met with the limitations of rural traditions, controlling patriarchy and their own notions of morality. We met the acclaimed director Leena Yadav and talked about film, feminism and how patriarchy affects us all.

VICE: Before watching Parched, I went in with the notion that the film was going to be a dark portrayal of violence against women – and in some ways it was, but it was much more than that. It was almost…a happy film?
Leena Yadav: I don't know about happy, but yes, I wanted the audience to experience the whole range of emotions, because that's what life is, isn't it? Sometimes you have a bad day and some days you grab onto happiness and that's the whole spirit. So you look for those moments where you can laugh and enjoy the joy in life. And it's very much inspired by these women I meet and I realized that in life, it's sometimes very hard to tell what a tough time people are going through. And I think that that is the spirit that makes us fight or makes us question things. If one would just accept the circumstances and get depressed, then there is no hope, you know. So that's exactly the spirit I wanted to portray and if I did communicate that, then I think that's amazing. Everything else is circumstances and incidents, but you have one life and at the end of it you have to find out how you can celebrate its existence.

The women in the film are forced to be exceptionally creative because of the oppression they're faced with on a daily basis, in the form of the patriarchal system on the countryside. Would you say it is like that in the India of today?
What I'm showing is a society where there's no education, no information, and no exposure. You can call it an excuse for the oppression of women. But I know that kind of oppression still goes on here [Sweden], so what's the excuse for it happening here? Whats the excuse for it happening in America? America has one of the highest rates of domestic violence, why does it exist there?

It's almost like that oppression is a global and everlasting condition we all have to suffer through.
If you look at your own reality, you see that at many levels, women compromise themselves. So it might be different in terms of circumstances, but all the stories are the same. And that is the reason I made Parched.

So what you're saying is that it doesn't matter where you are on a social or economic level, the patriarchy still affects us all?
Sometimes you are covering it up because you're coming from a different society. I mean, if it did happen in Sweden, people would say "I can't talk about this because we are supposed to be a country with equality" – its embarrassing. So imagine how much of this is going on without being reported.

True.
I think men are equal victims of this mind-set and all the conditioning that comes with it. To me, my film is made up of observations from life and I just want people to say: "We need to talk about these things".

The film touches upon themes of sexuality, infidelity, and violence and I'm curious to know how you think the film will be received in your home country?
I haven't shown it yet. And unfortunately we aren't allowed to show sex scenes. I feel like we need to start talking about sex in India – just start talking about it and get it out of our system. I feel like we put sex on a pedestal, and by doing that it becomes even more intriguing. My country has the second biggest population in the world, but we don't talk about sex? I want to be optimistic about this and I want to believe that my country is ready for this film. It's not all sexual, it's also about touch and isolation. And in that sense I feel that this is something that needs to be addressed much more in Western society, than in India. Indians touch each other a lot. At the end of the day, we're all animals right? You know, you need nutrition and human touch is full of it. The human touch is almost as nutritious as the vitamins and minerals that we tend to focus so much on. I think touch is the most essential nutrition we have. When you see someone emotionally down, what is your first instinct? Your very primal instinct is to touch them.

That was actually one of the things I was thinking about while watching the film – the women aren't afraid to touch each other. Here in Sweden, you cant just touch someone without having an acceptable reason behind it. We're pretty physically isolated in that way.
It's something everybody is craving for. When I meet people they just want to talk, they want to connect, they want to touch. That was a very big thing that I wanted to talk about in the film. There's no better medicine than a warm hug.

There's a scene in the film that really got to me - that scene where one of the female leads tells her husband about her promotion and his reaction is the opposite of being proud – he sees the promotion as an attack on his manhood.
It's impotence again.

Is that reaction something you see in your field of work, as a professional and successful filmmaker? I want to say that you work "in a male dominated industry" but the whole world is a male dominated industry.
Yeah, I see it sometimes but I've learned to ignore that. I don't have any sad stories about that, and I have to give my parents credit for that. They really brought me up to be an individual. I really didn't know I was a girl and that I was inferior or superior. I was just this person who could do anything I wanted to do. They encouraged me to speak my mind.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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