Cinéma Rosé: Kim Longinotto

Some documentarians like to get in front of the camera, where they become the heroic protagonist, hunting down crooked CEOs or corrupt politicians. Others are philosopher poets who saturate their films’ soundtracks with musings and wild flights of fancy. Kim Longinotto, meanwhile, likes to watch – to silently film from the sidelines. If this cinéma vérité style suggests some sedate anthropological study, think again. Through patient observation, the award winning British director always finds fireworks, whether it’s in the family dispute courts of Tehran (Divorce Iranian Style), the female wrestling circuit of Japan (Gaea Girls), or in Kenya, where she exposes the barbaric practice of female castration (The Day I Will Never Forget).

Longinotto’s stock-in-trade is women and strange institutions. Her latest extraordinary feature, Pink Saris (winner of the top prize at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2010), is no different. In the rural villages of Uttar Pradesh, north India, she follows Sampat Pal Devi, the indefatigable leader of a gang of female vigilantes who, clad in the resplendent outfits of the title, mete out justice for the downtrodden women of the “untouchable” caste (the supposedly lowest class of citizens in traditional Hindu culture). “I'm drawn to people that are rebelling, people who are trying to change something,” Longinotto tells me. Sampat certainly fits this bill. Uneducated, married at twelve-years-old and part of the “untouchable” caste herself, she’s risen, through sheer force of will, to be an intimidating and influential figure in the region, so much so that she declares herself "the messiah for women" without a shred of irony and boasts of the time she “beat up a cop” to anyone within earshot.

Over the three months that Longinotto and her tiny crew (her on camera plus her translator/sound-man) follow Sampat, her messiah complex proves to be an early warning that she may not be the great feminist revolutionary her public profile suggests. “I think you can see gradually throughout the film how our expectations in her changed,” says the director wistfully. “There are hints of it at the beginning of the film when she refers to herself as commander-in-chief. That felt quite strange for the leader of a group of women, especially a group of women fighting the system.” As anyone who’s read a UK newspaper in 2011 will know, power corrupts. “It all links up to things that are happening in this country. The MPs’ expenses scandal, for example: people start to feel an entitlement, and Sampat is becoming a kind of politician.”

This isn’t to say that Sampat’s not a hero in many ways. Despite her ego and insatiable ambition – or perhaps because of it – we see her make a real difference to several abused young women in her own inimitable bull-in-a-china-shop style. The biggest ray of hope in the film is Renu, a pregnant teenager who’s been dumped by the father of her unborn child because his parents refuse to accept an “untouchable” into the family. Timid, uneducated and unloved, she blossoms under Sampat’s rough-edged maternal wing. “You watch Renu becoming someone else very quickly. She taught herself to read in three months, which is pretty extraordinary. By the end it’s her who’s wiping away Sampat’s tears, she is the strong one.” Although the film is in many ways hopeful, the director is quick to point out the enormity of the problem in this part of India. “The hopeless side of it is the sheer scale: all these little villages where girls are buried away.”

Sampat may not be perfect, but she gives these buried women a voice, and a wonderfully loud, opinionated, blasphemous and foul-mouthed one at that. “That's where Sampat comes into her own. She always says to people, 'we know you're here, we're watching you now. If this girl dies, the entire village will know what you've been doing and you can’t pretend it's an accident.’ That's Sampat's role: to make things public, to shed light on things that are very hidden.”

In her own subtle way, Longinotto is doing exactly the same.