Sama in the Forest

In a creative collaboration with local community members in Madhubani, India, this hybrid documentary highlights the tale of Sama, a young princess who wanders into the forest and befriends a young man, only to be slandered by a muckraking confidante of the king, and subsequently cursed and banished by her father, Lord Krisna. 

The film combines footage of women telling different versions of the tale, the making of elaborate narrative paintings, a dramatization of the story, a yearly festival that celebrates Sama, and in-depth conversations about the morals and meanings of this and other traditional tales. The girls and women at the heart of the film are students and teachers at the Mithila Art Institute, a small school for young aspiring artists. Additional participants — community members of different genders, castes, and generations — help paint a complex picture of the social tensions evident in Mithila today.

The festival of Sama Chakeva is both unique to the Mithila region, and special in several of its qualities – notably, in its multi-caste, non-priestly, female-centric, playful and even bawdy nature. This festival is celebrated by groups of women and girls, who join together to enter the mythical world of Sama in song and ritual. They bond in teasing and torturing the muckraking character, to ensure the devotion of their brothers for years to come, and arguably to shine a critical light on some of the patriarchal aspects of their own culture.

The painters of the three paintings included in the film are all trained in the Mithila Art tradition that derives originally from a domestic, ceremonial form of expression and for which the region is renowned. Finally, another key element of the film, intricately interwoven with the others, is an enactment of the Sama story by the very same people who are also interviewed in the film. The workshopping in preparation for the enactment provided an opportunity for collaborative meaning making and personal reflection on the significance of the story in their lives today. And the filmed enactment itself enables the filmmakers to deliver these meanings to a wider audience.