8th March is celebrated throughout the globe as International Women’s Day and to mark the occasion variety of programmes take place e.g. Bike rallies, Half Marathons, talk shows etc. Varsha Tawde, better half of Honourable State Minister Vinod Tawde, through her Bharatiya Stree Shakti organisation, organised a panel discussion on ‘Woman in socialistic reality and cinema’, through a film festival ‘O Womaniya’ which screened international, national and regional films, at Sathye college auditorium in Mumbai.

National award winning film/drama director, Chandrakant Kulkarni , Pallavi Joshi, a national award winning actress , Abhiram Bhadkamkar, director, actor and writer , Samruddhi Porey, national award winner film maker, were the panellist , whereas Rajni Velankar, a well known name in acting field, conducted the function. The discussion started on a controversial documentary ‘India’s Daughter’ on Nirbhaya, with a question on film’s impact on crimes and rapes in society.

Chandrakant Kulkarni denied any such impact and said at length ‘All my body of work has been women-centric in some way or the other. If films are responsible for atrocities in society, then why the image of police depicted in films is contrary to that?’ Though Samruddhi Porey admitted that fractionally it may be true, but posed a counter question, how come good things are not picked up from films?’

On aggressive views of Ragini Chandratre, President BSS, writer Abhiram Bhadkamkar countered saying ‘no one wants labelling on these issue’ and stated that females in films are still searching for an identity. “Because, films raised issues of women, women started realising about their own issues. Rapes existed even before films were made.” he continued . Pallavi Joshi, who joined the panel a little late ,realistically stated, “Earlier villain/vamps in films showed us a mirror as to what was wrong in our society. But in today’s scenario no one knows who the villain is; and we are witnessing circus in the name of cinema. A lot of film makers are interested in women-centric subjects but lack of viewers’ patronage discourages them. We as a audience should support these ventures as we support other commercial films” she was talking in depth. In fact both Joshi and Kulkarni, with their light hearted comments, kept the audience in good spirit.