startribute
KAJOL said people from the fraternity, including production houses, need to “police” their own and ensure a healthy working environment . ....
WITH most production houses constituting a team to address complaints of any form of harassment, actor Kajol believes film sets have become safer workspace for women. The actor said people from the fraternity, including production houses, need to “police” their own and ensure a healthy working environment.
“Right now, film sets are pretty safe. Our production house and a lot of others have put teams together to deal with people coming up to them with any kind of complaints. A film set is not a very big area. Everyone knows everything that’s happening.
“There’s not much that you can really keep a secret. But we have to police our own, there’s nobody from outside who’s going to come in (and check). Each production house has to take responsibility and work through it,” Kajol told PTI in an interview.
The Hindi film industry has often come under scanner for its gender imbalance – both on screen and off screen.
The 45-year-old actor said the industry is “slowly” moving in the right direction. “The world is gender imbalanced, not particularly the industry. But we are getting better. My short film
Devi had an all women cast, our cinematographer was a woman. “I’ve just finished working with Renuka (Shahane) as well, another female director and I’m really happy about that. We are indeed progressing in that direction.”
Kajol currently features in the short film, Devi, which depicts how nine women belonging to different strata of society are brought together by circumstance and end up forming a sisterhood after they share their stories of abuse.
Directed by Priyanka Banerjee, the short is produced by Niranjan Iyengar and Ryan Ivan Stephen.
Kajol said the conversation around abuse has been consistently happening but asked why it took a crime of Nirbhaya gangrape-murder-like proportions for people to stand up against atrocity.