Pyaari Meenu -Telling SNEHA’s story through the letters of a young girl

How does one even begin to express why investing in women’s health is so vital?

Be it reducing maternal deaths, improving infant and maternal health, family planning, or tackling domestic violence, a healthy woman is at the core of a prosperous urban world, and this is effectively conveyed in Pyaari Meenu, the film by Social Access on SNEHA’s efforts to build strong, healthy and secure urban communities.

Bringing together SNEHA’s various community interventions is not easy. However, Pyaari Meenu weaves those strands together quite beautifully.

“Our challenge was to convey all the program interventions they undertake in one central thought” says Lynn De Souza, founder, Social Access, “and we did this by stepping back and driving home the underlying premise, the belief that empowers all their work. This came through in the tag line “A healthy world begins with a healthy woman”. Even men get included in this thought!”

Pyaari Meenu uses the form of letters written to an unborn child to convey these ideas. “Letters are always a nicely emotive way to tell a story from a personal point of view. They draw the viewer into the experience, as observer and participant,” adds De Souza.

Shooting the film came with its own set of challenges as the milieu had to be real to bring home a sense of the community that SNEHA works in. Pooja Das Sarkar, who directed the film, says it was shot in just one day over 17 hours, remarkable given the noise and chaos that is present in any urban settlement.

“We chose a two-storied house – one to show the life stage of a younger girl, and another to show the older woman”, says Das Sarkar. But the challenges remained. “We chose lights that were small and could be used in a smaller space. At night, people were very curious and stood outside the house commenting on “Who is the heroine”? etc. It was funny but natural and we did not let it affect the shoot.”

Helping to make the process smoother were SNEHA workers. They explained to local residents what the film was about. “We sourced the kitchen, a baby’s cot and even a baby from the community”, adds Pooja. SNEHA staffers were also roped in to act, with Nasreen playing the key part of Bharati Didi.

The result is Pyaari Meenu – a haunting, evocative film that helps the audience understand SNEHA’s work and makes an emotional connect.