[The following interview was conducted for the Forum section of the Berlinale, where the filmmaker’s second feature Kottukkaali had its world premiere in February 2024.]
Berlinale Forum: As far as I know, the starting point for your film was an incident in your own family. Could you speak a bit about how you developed this into a script and a film?
PS Vinothraj: Yes, such occurrences were very common in my childhood, and I just internalized them growing up: “that’s how things are.” But once I became a filmmaker, there was another event in our extended family. That’s when I started exploring this idea, of how these foolish beliefs are fed into people when growing up. Doing so, I realized that it’s not an isolated incident in one village in the south of India. Rather, it happens all across the country. And women are usually the centre of such rituals and practices. This is when I felt it deserved to be made into a film.
Even as we speak, people are either making plans to visit seers for this ritual of exorcism, or they’re on their way back. It’s happening every minute.
The protagonist Meena is silent for most of the film. How did that develop?
In situations such as these in real life, the girl is usually silent and hardly allowed to express herself. It’s everyone around the girl who constantly speaks about her. And this is one of the reasons why I tried to portray Meena as a silent character. But I also think silence can convey adamance, more than overt arguments or fights. Meena has made up her mind, and no matter what the people around her do or say, she is steadfast in her thoughts and desires. I wanted to visually convey her grit and resolve, and that’s why I wrote her that way. Her silence is a defiant, adamant kind of silence.
We were wondering if the English title The Adamant Girl is the literal translation of Kottukkaali, or there’s some other meaning to the word.
In Southern Tamil Nadu, the word ‘kottukkaali’ is a dismissive term used to describe women, young and old, who do or say what they want. It’s very much related to the sense of an adamant girl.
Speaking about the form of the film, our selection committee liked that it is a road movie, and that you don’t exploit the more melodramatic aspects of it. How did you make this decision?
The intention was to closely follow people who have a certain belief system. And the goal was not to demonize or falsify them. The violence that they cause is an unwitting, innocent kind of violence. And the idea was to follow the characters in their world and observe their behaviour and beliefs, before finally arriving at a statement. That’s what led to the form of the film, which basically follows the characters in their everyday behaviour, speech and rituals.
[Read the full interview here]
The Seventh Art 