| MUMBAI:
Nandita Das has been called a film star ‘with a social conscience’,
more keen to talk about women’s empowerment and human rights than participate
in the glamour of Bollywood. CNN’s Anjali Rao catches up with Das in a sound
studio as she is post-producing her directorial movie debut “In Such Times”.
She tells Rao about her new film project, her controversial choice of film roles
in “Fire” and “Bawandar”, an emotional visit to Sri Lanka
in the aftermath of the Tsunami, and the honor of being a juror at the prestigious
Cannes Film Festival.
 For
an actress who “kind of stumbled upon acting” and “didn’t
ever want to be an actor to begin with”, Das’ talents are well-recognised,
most recently winning the French award of “Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres”
for her contribution to cinema. Das tells Rao that she acts because “there
are stories to tell…wonderful stories”, and she explains how the lack
of realism in typical Bollywood fare never attracted her: “There’s a
certain kind of cinema that I don’t relate to…I didn’t even grow
up watching them.“
Das brushes off the controversy stirred up by
her role in the film “Fire”: “The bigger evil was that how can
you talk about homosexuality in a society that would rather not talk about it.”
And of her role in “Bawandar” playing a woman who is gang raped: “I
often tell women that you’ve got to be strong, why do you feel humiliated
when you go through sexual abuse.” but she feels: “I don’t think
women’s empowerment is ever going to be possible without a society overall
wanting to change things.” Das
tells Rao about her new role behind the camera, directing “In Such Times”,
a movie about how acts of violence affects its characters’ lives: “I
think it’s a universal story, I think we are all concerned about violence…at
some level, there is a collective desire for peace and it’s good to examine
yourself.” Besides
telling stories on screen, Das also shares with Rao the experience of visiting
Sri Lanka and seeing the children in the aftermath of the Tsunami, she says: “they
subconsciously get stored somewhere in your mind and form your overall thinking,
or they help you to be a little more sensitive than one was.”
She
also tells Rao about a very special experience, being selected to be a member
of the Cannes Film Festival jury: “The best part of being in Cannes was not
just to see great films or to walk the red carpet and all the hype that is around
it, but to have those sessions with 8 other brilliant mind. | 
