‘Centrifugal’ is a brilliant one-minute black and white film by a 19-year-old Kerala student, depicting women’s lives within the traditions of Indian gendered hierarchies. His college film assignment during Covid became a short film with camera focussed only on the feet of women subjects. Yet he was able to convey multitude of subtle themes opening in death with her toes bound together before she travels to the funeral pyre and tracing a trajectory from infancy. It is a brilliant meditation on the progression of a restricted life which remains the reality of so many women whose invisible silenced narratives are woven into the myth of the idealized maternal. The film ends with an offering of alternative possibilities of a girlhood that encourages engagement, expressiveness and movement.
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