Death of a Daughter ; A cinematic focus on the tragedy of Rizana
With nearly a decade of silence after making his controversial cinematic debut ‘Sudu Kalu Saha Alu’ or “Shades of Ash”, Sudath Mahaadivulwewa is ready to make his second film on Rizana Nafeek, underage housemaid who shocked the entire nation and many a foreign nation after her tragic death by beheading.
When the all Sri Lanka was awaiting good news in a way of a pardon as requested by most powerful personalities including Queen Elizebeth II, the news of the death of this daughter from a poverty stricken family was unbearable.
“The news of her death was a complete shock for me. Like many Sri Lankans, I strongly believed that she would be freed. As soon as I heard the news it was so unbearable I left my office even without taking leave,” said Sudath describing his agonizing experience.
“That day I talked to many artistes song writers, script writers and playwrights to do something about what happened to this innocent girl,” the award winning filmmaker said.
Though nothing happened the tagline “Death of an innocent” reverberated in my mind for a long time, he said explaining how he got the seed of ‘The Red Milk’.
The film is to reach a wider audience and he is planning to make it an international film production and for the initial promotion he has got sponsorship from Germany as a part of the GTZ project Art Link.
Rizana was a young girl who was barely able to see to her own let alone needs of a lactating child. The curse that caused her beheading came in the form of a child’s feeding bottle.
Human milk gains its whiteness as blood that has been churned by maternal love to symbolize the zenith of a mother’s boundless love for her offspring.
The symbolic image that projects the weight of the title is thus proposed here as milk that has undergone a reversal in its form to retrace its flow to redness and become blood once again and thereby ‘The Red Milk’, he explained the choice of his title for the film.
However according to Sudath, the film is not going to be the life story of Rizana. “Nor is this film about the issue of the migrant workers in Sri Lanka. My film in its core deals with the question of the ‘death of the innocent,” he said.
By making this film I make the statement that “Death kills not only the dreams of the innocent dead, but also the hopes of the living”.
Centring around the whole incident from the time when the underage girl gives up her schooling to go to the Middle East to help her family which lives in a house like a cattle shed, the entire incident is to be highlighted in the film.
“Making forged documents to make a wrong identity of her as a trained housemaid, a teenage girl who is supposed to be in the security of a mother and a family is forced to do the work of a mother in an unknown land as a nanny and the unfortunate incident where a four-month old child is choked while Rizana was feeding her and the tragedy that took place thereafter are depicted in the film in three segments.
“It is like an abstract painting or a collage or feeling that leaves us after reading a poem,” the director who had extensively researched and found some of the first hand information about what happened to Rizana said.
“I am sure this will open a highly political discourse about sending housemaids to the Middle East. This is specially in the backdrop as another Sri Lankan woman is to be killed by stoning for an offence alleged to have been admitted by her,” Sudath argues.
“I strongly believe that the Unite Nation should intervene against these barbaric forms of punishment like beheading and stoning. The UN should have taken up this campaign a long long time ago,” he complained.
Sudath
“This story is about a death of a Muslim girl and I being a Sinhalese I feel it is more important that her story is handled by me rather than a person of her own community because after all to me she is another innocent daughter of this country and a human being,”.
The story of Rizana touched and disturbed me due to a very personal reason. I was a man who longed for a daughter, an opportunity I never got. With this background what happened to the daughter of this country upset me a lot.
“And worst of all is how the Saudi police handled this entire issue. They had got her to finger mark a so called confession written in an alien language-Arabic. The baby’s parents and Saudi police insisted that Nafeek was guilty of murder.
It was revealed that the Dawdami police failed to take the dead infant for a postmortem to determine for certain the cause of its death.
According to the Asian Human Rights Commission, “Nafeek allegedly signed a confession, but her lawyers argue that the confession was made under duress and, more importantly, Nafeek had no access to a translator during the initial questioning after she was arrested in 2005. Confessions are typically written in Arabic and signed by fingerprint.
Nafeek signed an affidavit on 30 January 2007 stating that the confession had been coerced. Nafeek was imprisoned and sentenced to death on 16 June 2007,” Sudath protested.
“I want to start a campaign to stop sending women for slave labour in the Middle East,” the director said in a firm note.
