Be Quiet, Abhirami!

I last attended Sheffield DocFest in 2009. I’d made lots of arrangements for my two young children before making the two-day trip to the #documentary festival. It was terribly exciting as it was my first time ever at a film festival and it presented me with an opportunity to engage with a community of industry professionals and aficionados alike. There were baffling terms like ‘market place’, ‘work flow’, and ‘commissioning editors’ bandied about but since everything was so new, the specifics really didn’t matter. I went to a few screenings and watched as filmmakers were quizzed on their funding strategies and camera equipment and other logistics that it was all fascinating to listen and learn. I waited for someone to ask the panel what childcare arrangement they had put in place when they went out to distant lands to films.

I wanted to ask, “Who took the phone call from the school on a Tuesday afternoon that said ‘your son has run into a football goalpost and his forehead is now swollen to the size of a tennis ball. Please come and collect him’?”, like it had happened to me just a few days earlier. Who took their kids to their dentist appointments while they were away for days on end. And crucially, how much did such care cost? How did they budget for it and who paid for it? But I never put my hand up to pose such uncomfortable questions.

To me they were magical storytellers who floated on stage to weave a spell, leaving behind the usual grime that surrounds quotidian life. They were concerned with filmmaking, that too with the elevated art of documentary film-making not with pedestrian detail as raising children and all the messiness that it comes wrapped with. In my mind, the two were mutually exclusive. ??

Despite making almost a dozen short documentaries at that point, and being written about in a Channel 4 magazine as ‘One To Watch’, I stepped away from the arena. Perhaps I was lazy not to have persisted, but I saw being a non-fiction filmmaker and a mother as two roles that were inherently incompatible. I never went back to the festival.

A few weeks ago, I was informed that I’d been selected to be part of this year’s Sheffield DocFest’s Alternative Realities Talent Market. For the year ending 31st of March 2023, I’d had 46 rejections for my applications to various arts and documentary call out and this was a break from the norm. The organising team had done a tremendous job of supporting us and bringing us in front of some seasoned industry professionals who have the power and the insights to bring our projects to life. Putting artists front and centre of the conversations was a brilliant move that gave us agency over our own work.

It was my first time there in 14 years and the following day, during a Q&A at a session on accessing available funding, I toyed with the question that I had failed to ask many years earlier. If my industry pass had not been subsidised by my selection the Talent Market, it would have cost me close to a thousand pounds to be in the room to receive information about funding and this was not including any childcare as my children are both strapping young men now who don’t need me to take them to the dentist.

I dithered for a moment and then asked the panel what they were doing to reach out to those who could not afford to be in the room, what were they doing to widen the access, open the gates and include more people who could apply to the various funding schemes?

My ears were ringing with embarrassment as I sat down after asking my question, that I did not hear fully hear what the panel had to say in response. I had paraded my own incapacity and now everyone knew that I had only got there by chance. In my head I could hear my old schoolteachers telling me (yet again!) to be quiet like the other girls and not be such a troublemaker. But I could also see the likes of my MA tutor Victoria Mapplebeck who has so much to raise the visibility of women like us with stories to tell and my own boss the indefatigable Dominique Unsworth MBE who has been working tirelessly to make #creativeindustries more #inclusive .

Whatever the response may have been, I knew I had done the right thing by asking a difficult question because to not do so would have been betraying myself from 2009 who had made the long journey to earn a seat in those hallowed portals and that was not acceptable. ?