Malayalam cinema is witnessing what might be a historic moment for the film industry. Women In Cinema Collective (a body formed after the abduction and assault of a Malayalam actress) have continually taken a stand on the industry’s blatant misogyny and the backlash that actor Parvathy (a member of the WCC) had to face after she took on Mammootty-starrer Kasaba at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK).
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Parvathy expressed disappointment at the senior statesman for mouthing dialogues where he offers to “fuck” his senior officer so hard that she’d find it difficult to walk for a week. The Mammootty fans took her comment as an ‘insult’ for their superstar and trolled the actor by starting a hate campaign against her upcoming film My Story.
The WCC has backed their member, and shared a DailyO piece which called out the superstars like Mammootty and Dileep for not addressing the fans, as the vitriol continued. The article only further prolonged the hate campaign against not just individual actors but also the WCC’s Facebook page, which has been downvoted with a series of 1-star ratings and inane reviews.
However, the other side of Facebook activism also came forward and began reviewing the page with 5-star ratings. Most of these ‘reviews’ championed the issues which the WCC has stood up for in the recent months including making Malayalam cinema a safer place for a woman to work in, minus any gender bias and erasing the blatant misogyny in the film industry which has been overlooked for too long.
The aggregate rating has now been brought from 1 to 1.9. While there are about 26,000 ratings of 1-star, the fightback is slowly and steadily beginning to show with nearly 7,000 5-star ratings for the same page.
The Internet always finds a way to surprise us, doesn’t it?
