IDSFFK 2024 | Colours of Kollywood, a student project, looks critically at colourism in the Tamil film industry

"Colours of Kollywood - A Melanin Deficiency" critiques colorism in Tamil cinema, highlighting the preference for fair-skinned women.

Young eyes are able to see what is obvious, but which at the same time remains hidden and unacknowledged in plain sight. Colours of Kollywood – A Melanin Deficiency, a short documentary made by a group of Bachelor of Visual Arts students of the MGR Film and Television Institute, look critically at the colourism in the Tamil cinema industry, by which women of light skin tones are seen in the female lead roles in a vast number of commercial films.

The documentary, screened in the short documentary competition category at the 16th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), was one of the highlights of the third day of the festival. Directed by 20-year-old Paro Salil, with cinematography by Akshay Paroonon, audiography by Subramaniya Bharathi and editing by M. Gopikrishnan, the film begins by looking at the absurdity of the situation with shots of a beachside in Chennai, and questioning the lack of representation in Tamil cinema of all the women of disparate skin tones seen there.

Lyrics of popular Tamil songs from the past couple of decades are translated for us to show how the heores are mouthing lines on the desirability of fair skinned women. The analysis gets even sharper when the documentary gets the talking heads, including filmmakers, activists and students, to look at the issue from a historical perspective.

Filmmaker K. Hariharan attributes it to a colonial hangover, but at the same time talks about how in the 1970s and 80s, filmmakers like K. Balachander had women of darker skin tones playing the lead in their films. But things began to change for the worse by the 1990s. Yet, at the same time, many of the leading men in Tamil cinema during the same period are dark skinned, with the preference for lighter skin tones limited just to the women. Many of these women are also “brown faced” to play characters of darker skin tones.

The documentary contrasts the situation with how brown skinned actors are playing leading roles in popular television series in the west like Bridgerton or Never Have I Ever. But, as Indian-born actor Mia Maelzer, who has been part of acclaimed projects elsewhere, says, they might find it hard to find a leading role in Tamil cinema. One can only hope that voices like that of the young makers of this film making it into the industry would bring about a change.