NEW DELHI: Terrified for her safety, Indian actress Sreelekha Mitra remembers pushing chairs and a sofa against her hotel door after she said an award-winning veteran director sexually harassed her.
Mitra waited 15 years to speak out about the incident, one of several cases exposing the dark underbelly of India’s Malayalam-language “Mollywood” film industry that has won awards at Cannes.
Her revelation was spurred by an explosive government report documenting widespread sexual harassment in an industry dominated by powerful and wealthy men who believe that an actress willing to kiss on screen would do the same in real life.
“That entire night I stayed awake,” Mitra, 51, told AFP.
Mitra was invited to a gathering at the director’s house, where she said he lured her into his room for a phone call with a cinematographer.
“He started playing with my hair and neck... I knew if I did not say anything then, his hand would roam around other parts of my body,” she said, describing events from 2009, when she was 36.
She left and returned to her hotel.
“The intentions behind his moves were pretty clear to me... I was petrified.”
Her case and close to a dozen others have triggered a MeToo reckoning in the industry, with at least 10 prominent figures accused, according to Indian media.
Kerala-based Mollywood is known for critically acclaimed movies with strong and progressive themes, a change from the big dance and song numbers of India’s giant Hindi-language Bollywood in Mumbai.
The industry is prolific, producing up to 200 films a year, loved not only by southern India’s 37 million Malayalam speakers, but also dubbed and streamed across the rest of India and abroad.
Internationally, its films have won awards, including the 1999 satire Marana Simhasanam (“Throne of Death“), winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes.
This year’s “Manjummel Boys,” a survival thriller, took $29 million at the box office, the highest-grossing Malayalam movie ever and the fifth-most successful in India this year.
The industry report, released August 19, said women actors faced the widespread “worst evil” of sexual harassment.
The report was released by the Hema Committee, headed by a former high court judge, set up after a leading Malayalam actress reported she was sexually assaulted in 2017.
Gopalakrishnan Padmanabhan, a prominent Malayalam actor better known by his stage name Dileep, was arrested for allegedly orchestrating the assault.
He was imprisoned for three months before being released on bail. The case continues.
But the release of the report has opened discussion on the far wider issue of chronic violence against women, encouraging people like Mitra to speak out in public for the first time.
It said that women who considered speaking out about sexual assault were silenced by threats to their life, and to their families.
Award-winning actress Parvathy Thiruvothu, 36, called the investigation a “game changer” and a “historic moment.”
“There was this idea that women working in the industry should feel grateful for having been given an opportunity by the men who were hiring them,” said Thiruvothu, a member of the campaign group Women in Cinema Collective.
Allegations of abuse in Indian cinema are not new.
It witnessed a wave in 2018, shortly after the 2017 MeToo movement erupted in Hollywood against disgraced US movie producer Harvey Weinstein.
But Thiruvothu called the latest allegations more than “MeToo Part Two.”
“It’s shaking everything,” she told AFP. “It isn’t an individual-to-individual complaint anymore. It’s about a systemic structure that has continued to fail women.”
Since the report, several top actors have been accused.
The Association of Malayalam Movie Artists was dissolved following the resignation of its chief on “moral grounds” with some members among the accused.
Ranjith Balakrishnan, 59, chairman of the state’s film academy, has also quit.
Balakrishnan, who denies any wrongdoing, was the man Mitra accused of sexual harassment.
Police have filed a case against him for outraging a woman’s modesty, a non-bailable offense.
Mitra, who until the release of the report had only mentioned the incident to an industry colleague, told AFP that Balakrishnan had misused “his power.”
Thiruvothu offered a message to all women in the film industry who have survived sexual assault.
“You are a skilled artist... do not listen to anyone who tells you to find another job if it is so difficult for you,” she said.
“This is your industry, as much as it is anybody else’s. Speak up, so that we are taking the space that is rightfully ours.”