Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mamta Singh. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Mamta, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The most meaningful project I worked on was a story I did on Kat-Katha, which means story of puppets, an NGO based in Delhi that engages with women who work in the brothels at GB Road, which is the red-light district of Delhi.
Meaning also came from my own learnings as a storyteller. Prepping and working on this story taught me so much not just about the women and the challenges of the NGO but how to look for profiles and film with dignity.
Storytelling is a great adventure and shaping the story is at the heart of it all. There are endless ways to shape the story, and figuring out the puzzle can be both exciting and frustrating at the same time.
As to how one finds the story itself well sometimes you’re out looking for stories and sometimes stories find you.
I stumbled upon Kat-Katha’s story while researching something else online.
The first phone call to them gave one a sense of the mission , vision, the people behind this effort.
The organization was impacting lives through various initiatives that were all equally relevant and helping the women and their children in some way or the other.
The idea of providing a safe home for the women and helping them build a life outside the brothels was a long standing dream for Gitanjali Babbar, the founder of Kat-Katha. For years the NGO had to shift their office many times as no one wanted to give space on rent to s*x workers.
Finally they found the right space to call home where the women were going to move to.
I felt that the angle of the next generation being out of the clutches of this trade would be a hopeful story to tell.

So we had our story. Safe home or as the women had named it Dream Village and them moving there was to be the focus.

Next was seeing who would be best to carry the story on their shoulders.
When making a story we are basically inviting the audience into someone’s world. Quality of the film will be based on whose world you are getting into and how deeply they let you in..
What you are ultimately looking for are not facts and figures and data , you want human experience , you’re looking for the person who is living the drama that you want to capture.
Fostering your story is so intimately tied to your cast.

Coming back to Kat-Katha, the plight of the women in the story, they had different back stories but once trapped inside their narratives were more or less almost similar.
The wouldn’t get food unless they earned.
If caught eating from another woman’s plate they were thrashed.
They were made to wear tight, skimpy clothes , loud make up.
They were not allowed to speak out, let alone step out.
They couldn’t refuse clients and had to take any number of them.
They lived in dingy dark rooms , that reeked of the smell of alcohol.
Gb Road for all the women was a hazy montage of all these images.
All women had similar stories so then how does one choose and zero in on the best profile to do justice to the story one wishes to tell.
What helped was answering the following questions:
• Look for that one thing about them and their story that makes them stand out or helps them become more relevant to your story.
• Are they engaged in some meaningful journey that is intriguing ?
• Is there some external and internal struggle?
• Real interest is locating the deeper motivations, diving deep into their lives and emotions
In our case the two main profiles were to be Jyoti & Arti. For them both, the decision to leave had something to do with their children.
Jyoti
Was trafficked at 14. Stayed in the Brothel till she was 32.Was now moving out to the safe home.
She was with a client when she caught her two year old son peeping from behind the curtain. That’s when she decided that this was no place to raise her children and she had to get out for them.

Arti
She was sold to a brothel by her cousin brother when she was 10. At the time we met her she had a daughter and was pregnant with her second child. The daughter would often ask Arti to take her home but Arti would wonder which home do I take her to ?
Her eyes would light up at the fact that her second child would not be born in the red light district but in a free space.
Getting the chosen profiles to open up was another challenge.
One felt that we didn’t need every woman to describe their history in detail, but it would be important for them to be frank about the discrimination or the fear they experience and also the reality they face, talk of the process of leaving s*x work , the experience of having to learn new skills , maybe even the conversations they will be having with their children about their past if at all.
How does one make them open up to you , build trust ?
Common mistakes one could make while approaching a profile; preconceived notions about people.
The first meeting is kind of a playful evaluation on both sides of if you want to carry this interaction forward.
It’s an outsider-insider equation where you are trying to get into their world. It involves getting out of your comfort zone ,one has to keep going and meeting, nurturing those relationships and its quite a skill really and you get better at it over time.

Gaining of trust is also about respecting the boundaries.

On the rece one is tempted to take stills of locations and in sensitive places its always better to ask before one does so.

On my first trip to the brothel I was just to accompany the NGO person , wasn’t going to be introduced as a film maker , they were just taking me to let me see what the place and people inside were like. I greeted any woman I came across and sat silently observing and listening to the conversations. At some point through gestures I asked the NGO representative if I could take pics of the brothel room where we were meeting the women and she just motioned with a head movement saying I shouldn’t. So one respected that and just made a mental note of things.

But where it was possible, I would go again and again. Before the filming I would spend time with them at the safe home. On each visit trying to remember their names and address each one correctly and remember their stories.

I showed them my previous work on women as a way to engage with them , gain their confidence.. anything that would help them gauge me and my motive better .

Showing that you don’t think of them as just a means to an end helped.

Share a meal with them.. the first time I went to meet them at the dream village I had gone at a time when I had just had lunch at home so I had politely refused… but they remembered this … and the next time they reminded me that “you didn’t eat with us .. today please eat something before leaving”… so from then on I made it a point to carry something for them and also sit and share whatever they had cooked that day in their kitchen. That continues even today when I visit them.
Sometimes when you have that kind of time and luxury , just filming them during your interactions is a way to get them comfortable to you and the camera. It also is research for what your film could be.
I assured them that one would not put out anything they did not want. And that I would show them the film before putting it out.

All this does take a toll, the stories they were sharing were not easy to listen to, things they told me and things I saw at the brothel during rece were something that stayed with me for a long while and I realised that for the first time ever I was exhausted and emotionally drained before we had even started filming.
Ensuring dignity in film making is also important
This involves ethical considerations such as informed consent, cultural sensitivity, and ensuring that the portrayal of the subjects aligns with their own self-perception.
Line of questioning and the way you frame your questions is also another way to be respectful or more gentler towards the profiles.
Give them the questions before hand or at least an idea of the things that will be touched upon.
Show that you care .When they feel understood they will be more open to you.
For the Kat-Katha story instead of asking the women to talk of the time there , or ask them to describe the rooms and make them relive things they wanted to forget I asked them to contrast the two spaces, speak about their children. They would light up as it made them to envision a future full of hope. So I tried to find ways to get them to a place where they reveal details that will help us tell a layered story rather than putting them on a spot.

Sometimes you may have access to the character but on the ground things could play out differently on the day .

All these techniques helped me create a safe space through the filming and helped extend respect and dignity to the profiles.

Another episode that stayed with me was with a daughter of a s*x worker, Komal. She must have been be 18/19 at the time. She had reluctantly on the NGO founder’s prodding and nudging said okay to just sit and draw for us. We used only closeups of hands and shots where we could not see her face.

For a follow up story I recently did again for the NGO, the founder Gitanjali told me that Komal is now in college and she asked me to interview Komal saying she has never spoken on camera to anyone and that , that would be a great story to inspire other young girls and their mothers , seeing what komal had accomplished in the ten years of her association with Kat-Katha. Komal was reluctant right from the start. But was curious about the whole filming and story we were trying to construct.

All through the day I kept her close.. let her help us out in little ways like asking the kids on the side to be quiet when they would be playing or laughing as one did the interviews, even hold the flexi which she was fascinated by and this gave her a sense of being involved. She saw how we were towards the women and had made them feel comfortable all throughout.

In between breaks and whenever I could, I kept talking to komal about why she needed to speak and what that could do for other girls who like her were still stuck there. She could be the one to give them hope.

I was pleasantly surprised when as we were done for the day and were almost packing up Komal came to me saying she could see what we were trying to do and that she would talk to me. Her interview was a very powerful one and she spoke so effectively and passionately telling how her life had been transformed in the ten years of being associated with Kat-Katha.

But then again just because we had her on camera… on the edit I took a decision of just using her voice.

The NGO told me later that komal also liked this fact and had given the film a double thumbs up!

This film was selected as one of the top 10 finalists in a nation-wide competition to showcase work by women in the NGO sector.

The main protagonist of the film, an ex-s*x worker and her daughter got a chance to not just fly to Mumbai for the award ceremony but got to be on stage and talk about their lives, struggles and transformation in front of a huge audience comprising of industry folks from the corporate and social sectors.

I think all this made this project a special and meaningful one.

Mamta, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a documentary film maker based in New Delhi. I have a media , communications and film-making background with about a decade plus of working in the media industry in India in various capacities. For the past few years I have been involved in several communications and film making projects for the development sector.

Storytelling was something that fascinated me growing up. After graduating with a science degree I pivoted to communications. A short stint in news made me realise I wanted to look at more nuanced storytelling , something that would give me the opportunity to tell more layered stories.

I found my calling in telling human interest stories. Telling stories that matter became my purpose and passion.

Over the years I have worked with several national and international NGOs, corporates, government agencies etc shining light on issues concerning women, children, health and hygiene, conservation, HIV AIDS, drug abuse to name a few.

I am proud of the impact videos I have been able to craft over the years that have helped the organisations and communities to put the spotlight on issues that matter and bring about change that is meaningful and sustainable.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I feel the story on s*x workers was something where I had to invest a lot in terms of getting access and researching the locations; the brothels of the red light area, getting close to the women , gaining their trust. All this took a toll on me and I realised that it was the first time that I was emotionally and mentally exhausted even before one could start filming.

Also once, while trying to film an interview inside a brothel suddenly there was commotion and one realised that me and the team had been locked inside. The brothel owner had put a huge lock on the door from the inside as there was a man who was trying to help a woman escape. Chaos sometimes brings clarity , we realised that there was no way we were going to finish the interview but what was more important was to get out safe and sound.

At another time while shooting on the might river Ganges in the monsoon season, it was our production manager who suddenly saw that our boat was approaching a giant whirlpool as one was trying to film our protagonists who were in another small boat next to ours. He showed presence of mind and started the motor of our boat and steered us away to safety.

Moments like these test once resilience but also show that without commitment and a bit of madness towards such storytelling it is impossible to keep at it for a long time.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Most rewarding is the opportunity to meet new people who let us into their lives, trust us with their stories , help us learn and grow as people and storytellers. What is also rewarding is travelling to new places that one wouldn’t necessarily otherwise in search for these stories and reflections that make us realise that often the backstories to these stories are equally fascinating and memorable.

It brings one great satisfaction that through our work we tell stories that are mindful, personal, engaging , powerful. Stories that bring us the larger picture, evoke hope, compassion, joy, anguish, concern. Help make a difference, raise issues and bring change. It’s a great purpose in life to be able to tell stories with a heart and soul , stories that matter.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mamtasingh.co.in/
• Instagram: mamta_psingh
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mamta-singh-a7a39039/

Image Credits

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