A woman who has stopped speaking. A young trans woman who leaves home and arrives in Chennai looking for somewhere to live. People who have spent years hiding parts of themselves from the world outside. For filmmaker Simon V Kurian, these are not stories to be arranged into a neat argument. They are lives unfolding, sometimes painfully, in front of his camera.
His latest feature documentary, 'A Quiet Reckoning', follows Chennai’s LGBTQ+ community through the work of Sunil Menon and Sahodaran, a community-led organisation supporting queer and trans people. Filmed over several years, it looks at what it takes to find support in a society that often makes people feel they do not belong.
Simon began filming in 2019, before the pandemic interrupted production for two years. When he returned, he could follow stories whose outcomes he could never have predicted. One was of a trans girl who experienced abuse at home before seeking help at Sahodaran. Another was a trans woman who had left Bengaluru after coming out and found refuge at Thozhi, a Chennai shelter. “The passage of time between filming allowed us to film that,” he says, showing how the organisation’s work shaped lives beyond a moment of crisis.
Simon chose to anchor the film in Chennai after meeting Sunil, whose approach to building an organisation run by the community, for the community, struck him as extraordinary. “They were in charge of their story,” he says of Sahodaran’s team, all of whom had lived experience.
For Sunil, the need for a community-led model came from witnessing the discomfort people experienced when seeking help through conventional NGOs. “I worked in an NGO and I felt the palpable discomfort of people from the community walking into our centre to access services through me and my assistant,” he says. Anyone who asked for him or his colleague, Sendhilvel, risked being identified as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. “So that kind of diverged their identity and they felt completely vulnerable.”
He wanted people to be able to access support without feeling exposed. The answer, he believed, was to empower community members and train them to run their own programmes. The change, he says, was visible in those who came to Sahodaran. “I saw a complete change in their self-confidence and the comfort in who they were coming to accept themselves and being comfortable in their own skin.”
That trust took time. Simon says he first had to build a relationship with them before they felt comfortable sharing their lives. He is conscious, too, of knowing when to stop filming. “You will know instinctively as a human being with empathy, when the subject wants you to stop,” he says. Sometimes, a look is enough.“My subjects are the most important thing. Nothing else matters,” he says.
He also questions why queer lives are so often discussed only through prejudice, violence and marginalisation. “These are just regular people,” he says. “Why do we set them aside and expect their friendships, or humour or social life, or relationships or ambitions to be different from any one of us?”
The need for such spaces extends beyond the immediate moment of crisis. Sahodaran’s crisis management team works with people facing difficulties involving their families or the police, while its shelters offer those who have left home a place to stay for up to three months as they look for housing and a regular source of income. Finding both remains difficult, Sunil says, particularly when landlords discover that a prospective tenant belongs to the LGBTQ+ community.
Employment opportunities, however, are beginning to open up. “Today we see a lot of companies opening the doors to employing people from the LGBT community and that is a huge step towards empowering the community,” he says. Sensitisation workshops conducted with organisations have also helped change attitudes in workplaces. “There's a lot of change in that department,” he says, while cautioning that progress remains gradual.
For Sunil, the work is far from over. He hopes younger queer and trans people will have access to resources that his generation did not. “Our generation grew up with nothing,” he says, recalling the fear and lack of support that marked his early years of working with the community.
Simon hopes the film reaches people who may disagree with its very premise, giving them reason to reconsider their views. Sunil sees the film as a record of that longer struggle, rather than a complete account of LGBTQ+ life in Chennai. “This is just a page in history,” he says, describing it as “a tribute to the spirit and strength of the community.” For him, the documentary is also a reminder of the work that remains, and of the people who have helped make change possible over the years. He describes it as an emotional experience and a privilege that Simon chose Sahodaran as the subject of his film, particularly given the time and persistence it took to earn the community’s trust.
A Quiet Reckoning to be screened on October 28 at 6 pm. At NFDC Tagore Theatre, RA Puram.
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