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What does it mean to be a woman in today's world? In response, French director Laetitia Colombani, who previously directed the film Angel Loves The Line, tells the story of three women in her debut novel, Braids.
French director Leticia Colombani and her novel debut Braid (by Celine Nieszawer)
The first story takes place in India, where Smecta is a "Dalit" living in Uttar Pradesh, a term for an absolutely untouchable "untouchable" who is considered dirty by India's upper castes. They are of extremely low status and are isolated on the margins. Smecta's husband was a mousetrap, unpaid, and allowed to keep only what he had caught. Therefore, rats are always their family's dinner, and it is the only meat they can eat.
Smita's job was to pick up dung with her bare hands, a job passed down from mother to daughter, and when she was 6 years old, her mother took her to work for the first time, and the stench of vespa-like puffs made her vomit. The mother said, "Look, then you do it." Now that her daughter Lalita is 6 years old, Smecta doesn't want to take her with her. She wanted her daughter to live better, longer, and be respected, and she wanted her to study. She tried her best to get Lalita to qualify for school, but her daughter was humiliated and beaten up on the first day of school. She decided to take her daughter out of the village in search of the possibility of a new life.
Stills from "Blazing Hot"
Choosing to flee is very sinister. Not long ago, a girl who was also Dalit was caught by the jats of the village while escaping through the fields and dragged to a deserted wasteland for two full days of gang rape. In their case, the victim of rape is a sinner: the way to punish a man who is in debt is to rape his wife; to punish a man who has an affair with a married woman is to rape his sister. Their village committee had sentenced two young women to be stripped naked and raped in public for having their brothers elope with a high-caste married woman. Rape has become a powerful weapon. Smita trembled with horror, but she did not change her decision to leave.
The story sounds a bit incredible, and you'll question whether it's true or not, and you'll also wonder if it happened in a very distant past. But alas, Smecta lives in the present. Although she is only a fictional character, the material that Leticia collects in her writing, the extreme violence, is real. As far as she knows, about 2 million women are murdered across India every year, but no one cares. To this day, there are still 200,000 women in India who, like Smecta, do the work of digging up dung with their bare hands. Some even have to clean up hospital medical waste with their bare hands, mixed with patients' blood and other things, which is not only disgusting, but also causes serious health problems. Those who do this work are forced to contract various diseases, but out of religious ideas, few will resist and will not be able to escape fate.
Stills from "The Country Without Women"
Another story takes place in Canada, where the protagonist, Sarah, lives very close to us. She was a partner at a law firm in Montreal, Canada, a model of successful lawyers of her generation, admired and revered by people. At the age of forty, she had been married twice, divorced twice, and had three beautiful children and a male nanny in the family. No one can see the "wounds" beneath her delicate makeup and haute couture suits. No one noticed that she, like thousands of women in this country, was cut in two by the enormous pressure of work and the guilt of not having time to spend with her children.
She is good at hiding her private life in the workplace, just like people hide extramarital affairs. Twice pregnant, even with twins in her belly, she managed to hide it into childbirth. Before her, a female lawyer who had just been promoted to partner was immediately removed from her job as soon as she announced her pregnancy, and then fired. So, just two weeks after the caesarean section, Sarah returned to the office with a tired but delicate makeup, with her usual impeccable smile.
Stills from "Never Compromise"
For a long time, she also hid her breast cancer tightly - pregnancy will always end, but cancer is difficult to say, and the disease is like a stain that a person cannot erase. But this secret was eventually discovered by colleagues, and she began to be "forgotten" and "discriminated against" after losing her competitiveness and aggression. They alienated her, didn't invite her to conferences, went on dates, and stole her clients. For her, it was much scarier than chemotherapy, nausea, and hair loss. The word used in India to describe Dalit couldn't have been more appropriate for her at this time— "untouchable." She was "quarantined".
On the surface, the living conditions of Canadian women are very different from those of Indian women, who are generally believed to have enjoyed the so-called equal society. But in fact, under the dual pressure of the "glass ceiling" of the workplace and the need to balance family responsibilities, they simply cannot enjoy true freedom. The discrimination and bondage of women here is essentially the same as the situation of women in any corner of the world.
A few years ago, a female friend of Leticia's had breast cancer, just like Sarah. While accompanying her to buy wigs, the story's inspiration came suddenly — a wig that crossed the ocean connected women in three different parts of the world. On his way out, Smectar took his daughter on a pilgrimage to the Tirupati Temple, where the rich offered food, flowers, gold and silver, and jewelry, while the poor had only their hair. To give up one's hair means to renounce oneself and to show oneself to the gods in its most humble and primitive form. For Smecta, this filled her with strength and a new lease of life. After chemotherapy, Sarah found in front of the mirror what she had lost, her strength, self-esteem, willpower, and even her true self, through a hair cover made from the real hair of an Indian woman. The story of the duo is woven in parallel with julia, who saves a wig factory on the brink of closure by buying hair from a Hindu temple in Sicily, Italy, like a braid made of three strands of hair.
Different continents, different social cultures, and different religions, languages, social classes, family conditions, make their lives appear to have nothing in common, but they are imprisoned in their own way, and each carries a gender chain, whether visible or not. The impulse to freedom is the real bond between them, and the hair symbolizes a transmission of power. Leticia hopes to pay tribute to the courage of women with this book. "I'm a feminist." "I think it's impossible for a man who claims to be a humanist and cares for all of humanity," she said. ”
Stills from "All Is Well"
Leticia does not write about France in this book, but in fact, she herself also feels the shackles of gender. In an interview with the magazine, she said that only 22% of directors in France are women, and this proportion is already the highest in the world's film industry. 80% of producers are men, and they are naturally more inclined to masculine schemes that portray male characters. Once, she went to the producer with the script of a psychological suspense drama and got the reply: "This doesn't work, if you want to make a movie, you have to replace the heroine with the male lead." "Male directors can usually get more film budgets than female directors, and assuming that the average budget of male directors is 5 million euros, then female directors usually only get 3 million euros. With the same education and the same ability, female directors will also get less salary than male directors when filming, and this gap can reach up to 42%. As far as she knows, in France, this inequality exists in various industries, and the salaries of men and women in the same position are usually 20% to 30% different.
Sherry Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, once made a similar point in "One Step Forward." Women, she said, are often afraid to rush ahead, even more afraid to ask for promotions, and they get less in negotiations about money. Men tend to be overconfident, while women are usually less confident. In her book, she mentions a social survey in which men and women of the same level in medical school take the exam together and then asked them to rate themselves separately, and the results were generally lower than the true scores for girls, while boys were the opposite. It's like when you're in a meeting, where women always consciously sit back and men grab the front row.
Figure | Photo network
"Women should not be afraid to ask for more." Leticia said, "For more equality, women must always be sober and positive, because at any time, anywhere in the world, the rights that women have acquired can be reversed." When The Second Sex was published in 1949, the author Simone de Beauvoir said: "I hope that the book will become obsolete as soon as possible, and that women will be better off and no longer be the second sex." In 1976, in an interview with Radio Canada, she said that the situation for women was worse than when she first wrote "The Second Sex." It is clear that "The Second Sex" was not only not outdated at the time, but is still popular today. Some data have speculated that according to the current rhythm of women's rights progress, the realization of true equality between men and women in industrialized countries will not be until at least 2178.
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