Ghaziabad-based Manoj Kumar Gohil, screenplay writer and theatre artist, made his directorial debut this year with Accept Me, a film on albinism, an inherited group of disorders resulting in the absence or decreased production of melanin, the colouring pigment present in the skin, hair and eyes.
The 144 seconds silent film which took only a day to shoot, has its roots in Gohil’s childhood when as a school boy at Shaheed Mangal Pandey Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya, Delhi, he was moved by the plight of an albino water vendor from whom everyone kept a distance. “As I grew up and developed my creative skills, I decided albinism would be the subject of my first film. There are a lot of misconceptions about this condition which need to be explained,” says Gohil, a journalism graduate of the Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism, Bhopal with postgraduate diplomas from Guru Jambheshwar University (Hisar, Haryana).
The film depicts a day in the life of Mohammed Shakit, a 17-year-old who does odd jobs for a living. It shows how he is shunned by ‘normal’ people who often mistake albinism for leprosy. “I wanted to get across the message that albinism is not an infectious disease, and cannot be transmitted through contact, blood transfusion, or other vectors. The principal gene which causes albinism prevents the body from making the usual amounts of the pigment melanin. Therefore, there’s no need to fear or shun albinos in society. Give them love, and acceptance. That’s the message of Accept Me,” says Gohil whose film is also available on You Tube and has been widely acclaimed in select media.
Studies indicate that nearly one in 17,000 people around the world suffers from this condition, and even animals exhibit it in rare cases. While albinos are looked upon with curiosity and dread in India, in countries such as Tanzania they are killed and their organs used to make medicines which are believed to have magical properties.
Gohil’s is perhaps the first film which empathises with albinos. Hollywood films routinely portray people afflicted with albinism as villains (DaVinci Code, The Time Machine and Matrix Reloaded).
The funding for the docu-mentary came from Gohil’s own savings accumulated over two years. “The greatest challenge was to find the lead actor. I first spotted Shakit when he was a water vendor but by the time I wrote the script he had left Delhi. Inquiries revealed that he was from Bihar and I managed to trace his phone number from a nearby phone booth,” recalls Gohil.
A former reporter with The Tribune, Chandigarh, Gohil is currently working on a number of scripts to propagate social messages. “I want to focus on neglected issues which no one likes to talk about, but which need to be talked about,” he says.
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Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)