LAKSHMI AND ME

"What sin did I commit to be born a woman?" muses 21-year-old Lakshmi who has worked as a maid in Mumbai, India, 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, since she was 10 years old. She had been employed for 6 years by Nishtha Jain before the filmmaker decided to make a documentary about her. As Jain followed Lakshmi to work in various houses around where she lives and interviewed her about her life, a personal bond between the two women grew, and Jain increasingly began to question the relationship between them – between employer and servant. When Lakshmi fell ill and her life was shaken by an unexpected pregnancy, Jain was by her side, but could these women ever truly see each other as equals? This intensely personal film raises questions that not only probe deep into the complexities of India's class-riven society but also examine the hierarchical relationship between filmmaker and subject. "I often went from thinking we were becoming friends", explains the filmmaker, "to wondering if our worlds, and worldviews, could ever really meet…"

"I wanted to make transparent the very process of making this film - the problems inherent in filming oneself and one's relationships. What is my relationship with my maid? How do I bring myself into the film? … Also, how would the process of filming affect our relationship? Though my attempt was to bridge distances and see if we could be equals, could it end up doing the opposite - making her more vulnerable? After all there was a double hierarchy at work here - not only of employer and employee, but also the inevitable power equation between who's behind the camera and who’s before it." Nishtha Jain