I Am Not Interested In Stories About Men

Megha Ramaswamy discusses about her short, Lalanna's Song, themes of women's agency and religious hatred, and choosing children as protagonists

- NARAYANI M

At first glance, Shoby (Parvathy Thiruvothu) and Miriam (Rima Kallingal) seem to be having a mundane day, wearing their burqas with a heart pin, and speaking their mind in Mumbai where religious hatred is casually thrown at them every other day. This is, until they meet a young girl Lalanna (Nakshatra Indrajith), who shakes their core. Director Megha Ramaswamy presents this child, at the centre of Lalanna's Song (on Mubi), as someone who opens the protagonists' eyes through an unsettling tragedy.

Megha believes that, along with her, every woman she has met is a Lalanna. "We all go through moments where we're pushed off the cliff by people. Some of us survive; some don't. The short is a homage to both—those who made it and those who didn't. But at its core, it's really about the women who were pushed off the cliff in the first place," she says.

Megha, who wrote Bejoy Nambiar's Shaitan (2011) and made her directorial debut with the Netflix film