Miriam Chandy’s documentary goes from the shadows to the screens

From the Shadows, a documentary by Miriam Chandy Menacherry, follows two women working with survivors of child sex trafficking in their fight for justice

It started six years ago, when Mumbai-based filmmaker Miriam Chandy Menacherry saw the silhouette of a girl painted on a wall, first in Kolkata, then Mumbai and Bengaluru. The artwork was accompanied by #missingirls and a message that read “every 8 minutes”.  

The haunting shadow, part of artist Leena Kejriwal’s public art project on sex trafficking of young girls in India, brought home a sordid reality to Miriam, a filmmaker known for spotlighting lesser-known stories of real people through acclaimed documentaries such as Rat Race (on a Bollywood dancer moonlighting as a rat killer) and Lyari Notes (on children who choose music over violence in an area known for gang warfare in Pakistan).

The journey that began with chasing shadows culminated in From the Shadows, a documentary that follows two women working with survivors of child sex trafficking to take on the trafficking nexus in the country. There is Leena who stands by Samina’s protracted battle against her traffickers, who hail from her village and activist Hasina Kharbhih who is helping rescued young girls get across international borders to Bangladesh, their homeland.  

As it intercuts between their individual trajectories, the film speaks about the mental and physical struggles of survivors, their long road to justice and rehabilitation, the need for awareness among vulnerable communities and the role of the State. 

For Miriam, the subject of her film was a legal minefield fraught with the danger of missteps. Not only did she have to grapple with the ethics of representation as a filmmaker, but owing to the court case, the inability to use Samina’s face as a canvas to tell the story, also posed a further challenge.

In Bengaluru for the screening of her documentary, Miriam spoke about From The Shadows (FTS), which, in her own words, has been her most difficult film till date.  

It was a huge challenge to distil the essence because you are no longer using the same visual that you shot with, but generic images. That required a bit of craftmanship beyond normal editing where sync sound is used with the character. I don’t think the story changed. The highlights were still the ups and downs of Samina’s tireless trips to court, her legal battle for justice and the twists that it threw up at every stage. So what we had taken as safety shots became the actual shots for the entire scene. Long shots had to be used because those were the only ones where you couldn’t see her face clearly.