SYNOPSIS

An estranged migrant working-class couple, after losing their daughter to an ill-fated custom, seeks friends in each other.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Being non-binary, I could never really fit myself into the pre-existent template of colonial heteronormative gender-binary and rather have always seen binary as a political tool to preserve gender hierarchy. It has always troubled me how grief too is gendered and A Lullaby for Yellow Roses examines further into this line. Maybe try donning the shoes of a parent who can’t afford their child to see the light of life. In India and a larger South Asian pan, though illegitimate, Dowry and Female Feticide, hand-in-hand, are still in frequent practice. Several working-class parents, presuming that they cannot pay for their daughter’s bride’s price or dowry when the time comes, like the protagonists of our film, a migrant couple, are made to choose to sacrifice their girl child. Daughters are burdens. Dono, my maternal uncle, and his wife had to go through such an unfortunate incident. They had to lose two toddlers back to back to an unknown ailment. Though I was a kid back then, I clearly remember maima, Dono’s wife, fainting every alternate hour and waking up wailing to consciousness. But Dono was not only allowed to cry in public but also he was always being asked to man up and take care of his wife. He was left to puffing spliffs in the backyard, quietly gulping his tears, aloof from everyone’s eyes. Aren’t men entitled to cry when going through misery? In the first half of our film, Beena sees her husband as the murderer of her unborn daughter, but little did she know that he too was suffering silently, as he too had lost his daughter. Both fall prey to patriarchy, trained to play their expected parts dictated by the social template, Beena and Pankaj give in to female feticide. Following this heinous incident, blinded by grief, this estranged couple finds friends in each other. It brings to them a mutual space where they can bare their unsaid vulnerabilities for the first time since they got married to each other. While condemning such issues as patriarchy, gender hierarchy, and economic imbalance in the Indian context, our short film probes global prevalence.