“Anuja”: A Little Girl Sparkles In Oscar-Nominated Film

Two sisters in a New Delhi slum giggle as they read the matrimonial ads in the classifieds section of a crumpled newspaper picked up from the streets.

Palak, 17, holds a rusty old torch for her kid sister, Anuja, while the nine-year-old slowly reads the Hindi text.

“Gainfully employed man…” Anuja bites her lip as she struggles with a difficult word.

“Seeks,” supplies her big sister.

“Seeks an equally suitable bride... ” the little one carries on with the informal reading exercise.

“The eligible girl should have fair skin,” little Anuja enunciates the imperative dramatically. She’s turning up the fun quotient of this unorthodox slum-study programme.

“Does my skin look fair?” asks Palak, turning the torch on her face in the dilapidated, candlelit hut, where a leak in the roof is used to collect water by night and irrigate a potted plant by day.

“Not fair enough,” Anuja pronounces as the sisters crack up.

The literacy-via-matrimonial-ads class continues.

“Girl should not be too ambitious in terms of work,” reads Anuja.

Now her wise older sister is genuinely confused. “Should not be ambitious? If the girl is not ambitious, then who will be?” asks Palak. “Do the boys ever get any work done?” she asks with a face-splitting grin.

“Of course not,” comes the reply as the girls collapse laughing.

In their world, women of all ages – grannies, mothers, pre-teens, teenagers – work. It’s low-paid, unskilled, grinding work in one of the innumerable garment factories found in countries offering cheap labour for global markets driven by relentless consumption cycles.

The two sisters are the main characters in “Anuja”, an award-winning film, which was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year in the live action short film category.

An Oscar ‘rollercoaster ride’

For director and scriptwriter Adam Graves, the past few weeks have been overwhelming. A philosophy professor with an academic oeuvre in scholarly books and periodicals, Graves first took a stab at filmmaking during the Covid pandemic. The extra downtime meant he could shoot on location, which happened to be the family living room during lockdown.

From home movie-maker to Oscar-nominated debut director, Graves has had a “rollercoaster ride” over the past few weeks, he admitted in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “I don't think I’ve had time to process it, to be honest,” he confessed. “When we were filming, I knew the story was special. I knew the performances were incredible – it was like capturing lightning in a bottle. I was so proud of the film that we put together. But I just didn't think it would be nominated alongside other great films – and it’s soon to be on Netflix. We didn't realise the film would have such a large audience. It’s really incredible.”

Graves worked on the film project with his wife, Suchitra Mattai, a Guyanese-born American visual artist whose work often explores her family’s roots in northern India, from where her ancestors were shipped as indentured labourers to work on British colonial plantations in the Caribbean.  

“That history of indentured labour is something that she's been doing a lot of research into because it's kind of a repressed aspect of her family history,” explained Graves. “So, we were thinking a lot about labour, and we happened upon this statistic that one out of ten children globally is engaged in child labour. That stood out as a really shocking statistic.”

Along with Mattai, who is one of the co-producers of “Anuja”, Graves started researching child labour. India was a logical place to go since, in addition to Mattai’s South Asian origins, Graves had also spent considerable time in the country as an undergrad and graduate student, including a university stint, doing research projects and studying medieval Sanskrit literature.

- Author: Leela JACINTO, France24