White (2018)

SILENCE is most wisely inaugurated to undermine the lack of human values; in short, silence is something that can be best used when people discover no ‘word’ is a better substitute. White is a silent feature film by Aneek Chaudhuri that describes the universal topic of Rape. The film is produced under the banner of La artiste productions and is set to play it globally in the coming year.

After The Wife’s Letter been screened at Festival de Cannes, the director wanted to shoot something that owes a lot to the society; and he could find no other topic that interests him and haunts him (interests him due to the courage of women to survive it and fight it back and haunts him due to the heinous nature of this crime). White tells the story of three different women that hold parallel lives with no mode of intersection between them.

White features Kaushik Roy in the lead character, who is supposedly the sole male protagonist in the film; he had already proved his mettle in Aneek’s The Wife’s Letter shot in 2017. Beside him, the three female characters are portrayed on screen by Arjaa Banerjee, Sayantee Chattoraj and Priyanka Dey.

A scene from the film White

Once again, Aneek has preferred actors over stars to make a film and as he says it better, “I am making a film, not a commercial where people would be drooling over glamour, dresses or the lack of it. Hence, acting plays an important part in the film.”

As mentioned above, White is a combination of three tales where the first story is about a factory girl being raped. The second tale is about a single mother and her abandoned child to experience motherly reflections after 20 years; the concluding tale is of a married woman getting raped. However, the whole film is not about labelling women as victims, rather this echoes about the courage that defies even the most heinous act ever happened to them. White is about surviving Rape.

There might two questions that have already started hovering over the readers’ minds. First would be related to the title of this film and second is its nature of being silent (without dialogues).

Best quoted by the director, “White speaks of a ray of optimism that always appears in darkness. And women being the ones always bearing the brunt of many things in this society, have grown this instinct of surviving and fighting the most dreadful situations. Rape is certainly one of them.” Secondly, Rape is an issue that needs not to be expressed in words.