Wednesday 1 March 2017

The camera exposes a dirty untruth

The camera exposes a dirty untruth


The camera exposes a dirty untruth
B Kolappan, The Hindu, Chennai, February 27, 2017
 
‘Kakkoos,’ a documentary made by a woman film-maker, says manual scavenging never disappeared
 
A public toilet comes sharply into view. Around the human waste there, sanitary napkins lie scattered, along with dead rats and other animals. A woman sanitary worker, using two sticks as tongs, collects them. At times, she is forced to pick them up by hand and make a heap before setting it on fire. Coughing constantly as smoke and fire emerges from the heap, she leaves the spot.
 
This scene from Kakkoos, a documentary released on Sunday, portrays the miserable lives and working conditions of conservancy workers who are forced to do manual scavenging in almost every part of Tamil Nadu.
 
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Documentary Film Kakkoos’s Trailer
 
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Staple your eyes if you must, but watch ‘Kakkoos’ Divya’s haunting film on manual scavenging
 
25 year old Divya Bharathi's Kakkoos is a searing documentary on the lives of manual scavengers in Tamil Nadu.
 
In the beginning, you'll find yourself wishing for a stronger stomach to handle the visuals her unforgiving camera throws at you - toilets overflowing with feces, humans collecting feces with their bare hands, humans plunging their hands into drains and more - but as the film progresses, the disgust is no longer to do with what's being shown on screen.
 
Instead, the disgust turns towards yourself and the apathy that you, along with the rest of society, have shown this issue all along for far too long. 

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