Thiruvananthapuram: The makers of the independent Malayalam film, Chaayam Poosiya Veedu (The Painted House), are on a collision course with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) over their “creative right” to retain three crucial scenes of nudity.
The film, one of 14 Asian and Latin American titles competing for awards at the ongoing 20th International Film Festival, is the first feature film directed by Trivandrum-based brothers Satish and Santosh Babusenan.
The bone of contention in The Painted House are three sequences in which Neha Mahajan, a gifted and gutsy young actress from Pune, sheds her clothes.
“The regional office of CBFC has ruled that The Painted House will be given a censor certificate only if the three scenes in question are deleted,” says Santosh Babusenan. “We will have none of it.”
Says Satish Babusenan: “We are the creators of this film and we assert the right to show it to the world exactly as we have envisaged it, without any tampering.”
According to Santosh Babusenan, the directors offered to accept an ‘Adult' certificate for their film, but the regional officer of CBFC nixed that suggestion.
On her part, Mahajan, who was first seen on the big screen in Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children, defends the film and her decision to be a part of it.
“I was only doing my job as an actress,” she says, asserting that her nude scenes in the film are neither exploitative nor prurient.
Mahajan, a concert-level sitar player who cut her teeth as an actress in Marathi theatre, has done lead roles in Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukhtankar's Hindi film Bewaqt Baarish and Gajendra Ahire's Nilkanth Master.
The Painted House tells the story of a respected writer who, in the autumn of his life, receives an unexpected visitor to his isolated home – a seductive girl who is young enough to be his granddaughter.
The next day, a man rings the doorbell, seeking help to fix his mini transport van, which has broken down near the writer's house.
The self-absorbed writer's veneer of refinement and restraint cracks in the face of a crisis triggered by the mystery girl, who erases the writer's latest work from the computer and burns the printouts, and the young man, who whisks the man of letters away to his sprawling, deserted mansion on the hill.
IFFK 2015 draws to a close on Friday, when the winners of the Golden Crow Pheasant awards will be announced at a closing ceremony.
