A young woman undoes the little dress strand she knitted for her unborn daughter. The child’s phantom lingers around the mother, taking shape in the unused toys and newborn’s objects, while her environment doesn’t seem to perceive her pain and perpetrates a rhetoric of control over women’s body, affirming that “women are bound to suffer”. When the woman repurposes the strand to knit a new item to wear, she is eventually able to share, together with her husband, all the grief for their loss and start over. Rahul Roye’s Indian short film A lullaby for yellow roses has just entered Sayonara Film’s distribution catalogue and is premiering this week at 32nd Flickerfest – International Short Film Festival in Australia. For the occasion, we interviewed the director who told us about the genesis and the production of this work, able to touch with extreme sensitivity social topics profoundly rooted into India’s female population treatment.

Tell me shortly about your film education and your experiences in this field.

An English literature graduate, I haven’t studied film in a traditional fashion. I’ve learnt filmmaking and how to structure a narrative only by watching films and reading screenplays and books on the same. In 2021, during the pandemic lockdown, I made my directorial debut, a short film named Man & Wife, which has been warmly received by several international film festivals. A Lullaby For Yellow Roses is my second short as screenwriter and director.

How was A lullaby for yellow roses project born, and from which desire?

Our Producer Abdullah came up with the idea of mutual misery bringing two estranged people closer. And I’ve always been strangely amused by how the repercussion of grief is expected differently from different genders. Our film is about a distanced couple who has lost their daughter to an ill-fated destiny. This solid piece of grief breaks the ice between the two and fetches them a shared space of vulnerability.

Have you always had the dream to create a film like A lullaby for yellow roses?

Maybe try donning the shoes of a parent who can’t afford their child to see the light of life. In India, though illegitimate, dowry is still a frequent practice. And, many 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, are made to choose to sacrifice their girl child even before she was born. Dono, my maternal uncle, and his wife had to go through such an unfortunate incident. Though I was a kid back then, I clearly remember Maima, Dono’s wife, fainting every second hour and waking up wailing to consciousness. Dono wasn’t allowed to cry in public as 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 while 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 as well was suffering silently, as he too had lost his daughter. Both fall prey to patriarchy, trained to play their expected parts by giving up their beloved unborn daughter, as society dictates daughters are burdens, but this estranged couple finds friends in each other. This ultimate grief brings them a mutual space where they can bare their true selves for the first time ever since they got married to each other. While condemning such issues as patriarchy, gender hierarchy, and economical imbalance in the Indian context, our short film probes global prevalence.

What parts of Rahul’s identity as an individual and as a director are present, in your opinion, in this project?

Being genderqueer myself, I’ve always condemned patriarchy and how it innately influences each gender role in the criterion of binary. Being struck by any unfortunate incident, everyone must react to the situation in individualistic manner, not how societal terms dictate.

After this important selection, what projects are you working on currently, or have planned for the future?

Being selected as a part of such a prestigious line-up is extremely overwhelming and encouraging. It feels incredible for your film being recognized by such an esteemed festival as Flickerfest. Right now, we are developing a short film having an AFAM transman as its protagonist, who anticipates a life-changing tragedy.

Chiara Bardella