To hear Shobhana Padinjhattil, tucked away in her office room at the entrance of the library, talk about realising a dream she had nursed for 25 years is as heartening as it is touching. She had, from the days she began watching world cinema as a university student, imagined making a film of her own. She wrote down ideas, stories, and whole scripts, only to stash them and get back to the realities of life. Shobhana, coming from a Dalit family in Thrissur, reluctantly took up a course in library science and climbed one long step after another to be in a position to fund her own film. She, who has been the state librarian in Kerala for 10 years, is now also the proud director of Girlfriends – her debut that has been chosen for the coveted International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) to be held in December this year.
That’s the festival that allowed her to dream to be a filmmaker, she says, having been a regular visitor since its first edition in the late 1990s. When she came to Thiruvananthapuram for her Masters, the IFFK was her greatest attraction. Even when she got a job at the Agricultural University on a good pay scale, she dropped it to remain in Thiruvananthapuram, just so that she could be where the IFFK is.
“I began watching world cinema before coming to Thiruvananthapuram – in my days at Kerala Varma College – attending screenings by film societies. Cinema became a passion,” Shobhana says.
The job of a librarian, financial issues, and the constraints faced by a woman in a strange city kept her from her dream for too long. Shobhana filled those years by watching films in plenty, reading, writing. “Now I have taken money out of my Provident Fund to finance the film, and found time on my off days to go to locations in and around Thiruvananthapuram to make the film,” she says.
Most of the indoor shots were filmed at her home in Thiruvananthapuram. The idea for the story struck her when she saw a nearby restaurant that was shut down during those early months of COVID-19. She imagined a story taking shape there, in front of the closed restaurant, where couples came to meet and conversations took unexpected turns. She got a few women, including actor Remya Valsala, and a trans woman she knew to play the main characters. “Rosa, the trans woman, reluctantly played the part of a relationship counsellor where all the stories unravel,” Shobhana says.
Her reading of literature found a place in the dialogues, she says. Some of it is experimental, some philosophical, but mostly she was able to film what she had in mind. She had no experience working on a set, except familiarity with the work of her husband Sreekrishnan KP, who too is a director. Shobhana relied on the rich cache of films she has fed herself on since she was a girl. And when it was time to name her film, she fell back on a favourite auteur, Michelangelo Antonioni, and borrowed the title of his 1955 film, Le Amiche (The Girlfriends).