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Who is Leena Manimekalai, filmmaker in soup over 'Kaali' poster?
Leena Manimekalai has stoked controversies through her films which dealt with social issues in a career spanning nearly two decades.
Filmmaker Leena Manimekalai is in the eye of a storm over the controversial poster of her latest film ‘Kaali'. The Delhi Police on Tuesday registered a case against her based on the complaint from a lawyer.
An FIR has also been lodged against her in Lucknow over the poster. However, Manimekalai is defiant despite social media outrage against her, vowing to raise her voice as long as she is alive. The Madurai-born filmmaker is no stranger to controversies.
Here are five things to know about the controversial filmmaker.
1. Leena Manimekalai belongs to a village called Maharajapuram in Madurai. Her father was a college lecturer. After she came to know about her family's plans to get her married, Leena left her home and came to Chennai. She applied for a job in a Tamil magazine. To her shock, the magazine owners handed her to her family. After much difficulty, she managed to convince her family for an engineering course. However, in the final year of her college she lost her father.
2. To support her family, Leena worked at an IT firm in Bengaluru for some years. Later she switched different jobs before realising her aspiration to become the voice of those sections of the society who were ignored. In 2002, she began work on her first film Mahatma. Since then, she never looked back.
3. She won several fellowships for her work on the marginalised sections of the society. Her films were showcased at various international film festivals. But she often struggled for funds to make her films. In one such instance, she couldn't pay the rent for her home after financing her film.
4. Her 2002 film Mahatma portrayed how minor girls were allegedly exploited by priests after being handed over to temples. Her first film sparked a massive controversy but she was undeterred. In 2004, she made another film on Dalit women which too landed in a controversy.
5. In 2011, Leena sparked another controversy after she made a documentary film on the plight of fishermen in Dhanushkodi called ‘Sengadal’. After a long fight with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), the film was released and was appreciated at several international film festivals.
