Mumbai, July 24: Point a camera and it will talk. It really doesn’t need a direction, but a thought to ponder,” says award winning documentary filmmaker Madhusudan Agarwal. The thoughts that were bothering the San Francisco film school graduate, were of accelerating social change. The medium to do so were short documentaries via a portal called mammovies.com.

That was a year ago; one film competition and several workshops later, 28-year-old Madhusudan and his filmmaker wife, Meghana, are now empowering school girls to pick up a camera and express themselves. “The project is called She, and we are enrolling young girls, between 10 to 15 years, from mobile schools in Dharavi and Kamathipura for filmmaking workshops. They will be told to carve out a manifestation of themselves; what it means to be a girl,” adds Madhusudan. He will divide the teams into groups of five, with a scriptwriter, director, producer, editor and cinematographer. “They will have a mentor who shall be guiding the students in every step of the way.” Madhusudan’s list of mentors includes Anupam Kher, Nagesh Kukunoor, Sachin Pilgaonkar, Binod Pradhan and Anurag Kashyap. They get to start in the second week of August. “It will be a learning process for us to interact with children. The experiment seeks to get the point of view of the young girls of Mumbai and make them express their ideas and experiences through film,” says Madhusudan who feels it doesn’t take a lot to make a movie, if one has passion and a vision. This is precisely why he will provide handy-cams and basic editing software to work on.

“We all have things to say and ideas to convey. I picked up the camera with that idea and floated the website for that reason. Now I am putting my thoughts in motion,” says the filmmaker. Madhusudan slipped into gear earlier with a time-based film competition, the Genesis Film Project, that invited newbies with cameras to script, film and edit a five-minute film on 101 NGOs in Mumbai within a period of 101 hours. The top 10 movies were selected by a panel of film personalities, the same who will be judging She. “Our goal was to make films that matter. At the same time we played investigators on local charities,” he adds. Madhusudan’s selected few won accolades, found theatres and some have now travelled up to the Marion Knott studios in Los Angeles to be screened starting July 21 for a week.

“As long as movies are being made,” he quips, “there will be causes to rescue.”