Cecilia takes us into India’s dark underbelly

Daniel Nelson

Cecilia

Image by Cecila

Thousands of children are lured, cajoled and trafficked into jobs in the city: 14-year-old Mati’s story is captured only because her own mother, Cecilia, works as a maid for a film-maker.

So when Cecilia gets the shocking news about her daughter’s death, the film-maker and his lawyer wife take an interest – and start filming, though Johar Pankaj admits he thought the affair would be sorted in a few days.

“I never thought that she [Cecilia] would face such huge problems, and that she would be hassled by the police,” he has said in an interview.

But at every turn, the inquiry into Mati’s personal story touches more people and becomes more complex, more mysterious – and more dangerous. 

For trying to find out how Mati came to be working in Delhi and why she apparently committed suicide takes Cecilia and the Pankajs into the world of traffickers, who have a hold over penniless, uneducated villagers, and in many cases over the legal system and who operate with such impunity that they can threaten and intimidate anyone who starts to interfere with their ruthless money-making.

That includes Cecilia’s husband and indeed most of the villagers, apart from one bold young woman who says straight to camera what she knows, from personal experience, about the men who steal the villagers’ children.

The film chronicles Cecilia’s visits to the village, where almost every household has lost a daughter to traffickers, and the conversations with police and lawyers as well as her anguish, confusion and terrible dilemmas as almost everyone concerned tries to pressure her into dropping the case.

Sadly, those pressing for silence include the Assam villagers who must share her anger but who know that asking awkward questions invites retaliation by the traffickers and by the police. As with many villagers around the world, whatever happens, however unjust, the top priority is to keep the police out. Their arrival is seen as adding fuel to a fire. It simply means trouble.

That’s the terrible truth that this simple, honest film exposes. There’s no happy ending, though there is a resolution of sorts. A brief note at the end of the film clearly suggests that for Cecilia the “resolution” was an unsatisfactory, enforced compromise.

The only positive point comes by chance: as the tale unfolds Johar Pankaj visits child labour campaigner Kailash Satyarthi to get advice – to find the activist’s office in party mood over the announcement that he has just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Satyarthi has fought free bonded labour and child slavery for years, and has freed more than 75,000. So though violence, trafficking, corruption and the complicity of officialdom are rife, enabled and reinforced by feudal attitudes to the poor, brave Indians are trying to bring it to a halt. 

* Cecilia is at the Curzon Bloomsbury on Friday 2 September, 6.30pm (followed by Skype Q&A with Pankaj Johar), and Saturday 3 September, 8.15pm, £9/£7.