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Saturday October 6th, 2007 7:00 PM: Yours Emotionally
Call It Slut
Nishtha Jain, 2006, India, Hindi with English subtitles, 14 minutes, DVD

This film is a mini-portrait of a transgender person who is more than a woman. Lakshmi Tripathi, a hijra, has a hilarious and yet acute insight into womanhood as she says: "The joy of being a woman is that you can wrap yourself in six metres of cloth and still appear naked." Confident, beautiful, graceful, magical, bold, wicked, and shocking …that’s Lakshmi for you, Lakshmi who simply "can’t stand hypocrites."

The narrative intersperses Lakshmi’s likes, dislikes, beliefs, and ideologies — a tribute to the beauty of honesty and confession. Lakshmi gives us her opinion on exploitation, the Kamasutra and the government ban on bar girls. "Government did a wonderful thing by banning the dance bars. First, there was one hurdle for the customers wanting to take bar girls to bed … and that was the stage. The government removed this hurdle. Ab yeh stage ko hatake ladki ko sidha bistar pe daal diya," she critiques.


Nishtha Jain

Starting her career as an editor and correspondent for video newsmagazines before joining the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Nishtha Jain specializes in Film Direction. Her diploma film Jam Invalid won the Gold Plaque at the Chicago International Film festival in 1999. Since then she has made several documentaries for Television and worked briefly as Executive Producer for a documentary channel ‘Chakra’.
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