Abstract

This study positions itself within the revolutionary formulation of a women’s collective in Malayalam cinema. The necessitating condition for the collectivization had been the violent patriarchal framework of the film industry revealed through the sexual assault of a famous Malayalam actress in 2017. The perennial realization about gender precarity in cinema became so apparent in the events that followed that a group of women actors, filmmakers, and technicians mobilized together in retaliation. The patrifocal mechanism of Malayalam cinema has been threatened by the collective sisterhood espoused by Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), as evidenced by the trivialization of women and the collective in daily discussions on the ontology of women’s collective. In the midst of mass-marketed false narratives of utopian working structures by certain industry segments, the collective strives for gender parity. Despite this, WCC has been successful in bringing about practical changes in the Malayalam film industry by organizing and pursuing reasonable policy changes and holding responsible parties, such as the government. The study would use the working mechanism of WCC as a social movement to understand the concerns of gendered precarity in a technologized framework, arguing that the digital involvement of the members can be considered an archive for constructing women’s film history. Further, an attempt to contextualize it in the broader history of the British women’s cinema movement and global women’s predicament will also be made to question the circularity and non-temporality of women’s issues in a bid to theorize the revolutionary potential of collectivization in present time.