Maya

I saw Maya yesterday at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. A young girl lives with her uncle and aunt, two well-respected people in a small village. Maya lives happily and spends her days playing with her nephew Sanjun. One day her first menstruation starts and the family travel to the village of her mother to celebrate the fact that she has become a grown-up woman.

The film starts with the text "based on true practises". Despite the radiance and loveliness of the movie, this line sticks with you, preparing you for an unavoidable climax in which things are not as pleasant as they seem.

Maya is a movie with an absolutely incredible scenery and cinematography. Beautiful Landscapes and sunsets create an almost serene silence in between the various scenes. Lighting and color are excellent and create an environment in which you can feel the warm climate. Scenes, sometimes slow but never boring, are kept light with subtle but effective humourous moments.

I found Maya a refreshing and overall quite light movie that deals with a heavy subject, revealed towards the end of the film. Just the crisp image, vivid colors and stunning soundtrack alone already make this movie worth watching. However, its subtle screenplay,gradually revealing a shocking truth is what really makes Maya a small gem.

Brilliant and heart-wrenching.

If you are an Indian born post-independence like me, this is a must to watch.

My heart just broke into a thousand pieces and something core to my existence died.

To think that this must still be happening in some remote corner of India is even more disgusting.

The biggest paradox that I cannot yet deal with is that a pristine form of art like Bharatanatyam or Sadir coexisted intensely intertwined with a similar age old system.

Digvijay Singh's tragic observation of life in secluded India is both invigorating, in the sense that life, and its people seem to care only for the simple things that make them happy, and it is above all savagely tragic, in ways that certain rites and traditions are not or should not exist in the first place.

The tragedy is amplified quite masterfully by the approach of the little girl's life. The film centers around her innocent childly activities and her simple (yet perhaps quite harsh) life in a poor under developped area of India. Unfortunately, fate would have it that the child must grow and become aware of certain aspects of life which simply can't be understood nor accepted.

This film is a prime example of how I see tragedy. To fully implement a strong sense of tragic, one needs to build it around simple minded genuine calmness. I found the film perfect in this aspect.

i saw this film recently at the cinemanila international film festival not knowing what to expect.

i went out of the theater truly shocked and repulsed, not by the film, but what it showed. the only thing that i kept on saying to my self was "i hope what the film showed was not true".

The first thing that struck me about the film "Maya" was the beautiful cinematography. Sweeping shots of the Indian landscape, touching moments between children and family, brilliant colors, close-up's of lizards (I'm guessing they mean something in Indian culture that I am not aware of.): all these contributed to the overall aesthetic appeal of the film. However, the visual beauty of the film provided a stark contrast to the actual message behind the images. This movie is about brutal religious practices still affecting young girls in some parts of India. The serenity of the majority of the film provides a stark contrast with the dark message beneath. This film not only raises awareness of these brutal practices but does so in the most effective of ways. "Maya" provides an extremely important message, and it also is an achievement in cinematic production. I thought this film was extremely well done, and it has taught me even more about practices such as these that still exist in a world outside mine.