Driving With Selvi

Synopsis

As the founder of Eyesfull, an independent documentary production company based in Toronto, Canadian filmmaker Elisa Paloschi has long demonstrated a commitment to social justice issues and to bringing largely underrepresented or silent voices to the screen. Her recent film, Driving with Selvi, is further evidence of this — an intimate encounter with South India’s first female taxi driver, who escaped an abusive child marriage and defied strict limitations on what women can do in a patriarchal society where human trafficking has run rampant for decades. Paloschi first met Selvi at a women’s shelter in 2004, while traveling to Mysore (in the southwestern state of Karnataka). So taken was the filmmaker with the eighteen-year-old that she spent the next decade recording hours of footage, which shows Selvi learning to drive, obtaining her license, starting her own taxi service, and reaching out to other women with similar ambitions or entrepreneurial goals in mind. The beauty of this initially self-funded film (which was eventually supported by grants and crowdfunding) results from the amount of time that Paloschi devoted to Selvi during and after production, in addition to the evident joy that the latter derives from sharing her uplifting story with others, both in India and throughout the world.

– By David Scott Diffrient