Watching movies with their ears

On the second day of the ongoing Jio MAMI film festival, a special screening of Milind Dhaimade’s debut feature Tu Hai Mera Sunday, saw a packed house of the visually-impaired and general audience at Le Reve, Bandra.

The screening was held in collaboration with an NGO, Point of View (POV), which promotes the cause of visually-impaired was a huge success.

Bishakha Datta, co-founder and executive director of POV along with visually-impaired Mumbai activist, Nidhi Goyal took forward the idea of audio description screening moderated by film critic Meenakshi Shedde and narrated by theatre actor Neha Singh.

“Black didn’t audio describe the tiny kiss in the film because they probably thought blind people are asexual, they do not need to know about the kiss,” says Nidhi, pointing at the 2005 film by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. “So we were very sure that we wanted to say how sexy everyone is in THMS. We tried describing every moment in the film because we feel experiencing life and romance is for everyone and not just for normal people,” she adds.

Appealing for more such screenings, Meenakshi said, “There are 20 million visually-impaired people in South Asia watch and love Bollywood movies. That’s a huge number. We request every Bollywood film to have an audio description for the visually-impaired.”

The film revolves around five regular guys who share a common goal — to play football at Juhu Beach every Sunday. While each one has their reason to look forward to the Sunday morning, there’s no doubt it’s a high point of their week. One Sunday, as a result of the actions of a senile old stranger who joins their game, a ban is issued on playing games at Juhu Beach. The group now has to look for a new place to play in the crowded city of Mumbai. More than just football, the film is about each of their lives and how each one deals with their own physical and emotional space.

Milind Dhaimade, writer-director of the film pledged to make audio descriptions for all his projects henceforth, “After receiving such a heartwarming response from the audience today, I have decided to make the audio descriptions of all my films so that visually-impaired people can watch it too.”