"If I Can Walk This Path, Those Who Come After Me Can Run": Leela Santhosh On Cinema, History And Reclaiming Adivasi Stories
Wayanad, Kerala: Perhaps that was what surprised me the most about Leela Santhosh. She never tried to make herself the centre of the story. Even when we spoke about her journey as one of Kerala’s pioneering Adivasi filmmakers, Leela refused to let the spotlight remain on her alone. She kept returning to the larger picture .The conversation was never about becoming the first. It was always about ensuring she wouldn’t remain the last.
“For me, Art is protest,” Leela says.
She says it almost casually, without trying to make the statement sound larger than it is. But that one sentence perhaps explains much of her journey as a filmmaker. For years, Adivasi communities have often appeared on screen through someone else’s imagination. Their lives have been reduced to familiar images of poverty, helplessness and silence. Leela Santhosh, a filmmaker from the Paniya community in Wayanad, has always questioned this limited portrayal. The Adivasi life she knows is much more complex.
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“There are struggles,” she acknowledges. “Nobody is denying that. But our lives are not only that.”
For Leela, a community can’t be defined only by its hardships. There is also happiness, creativity, love, art and resilience. There are traditions passed through generations, celebrations, and everyday moments that rarely find space in mainstream narratives. This is where she believes cinema has a responsibility.
Cinema, she says, has the power to revisit history, challenge accepted narratives and bring forward perspectives that have long remained unheard. A visual medium reaches people differently, allowing ideas and emotions to travel beyond words. That belief is what drew her towards filmmaking.
A major concern that comes up repeatedly in our conversation is the way Adivasi communities are represented in Malayalam cinema. She wonders why Adivasi characters are so often written as powerless people, those who need to be protected, rescued or spoken for.
“Why should they always be shown like that?” she asks.
Leela, strongly believes that there are many talented artists within Adivasi communities who deserve opportunities to represent their own lives on screen. This question of representation naturally leads to the larger question of ownership – who gets to tell a story and whose perspective becomes history.
Leela Santhosh, Kerala’s noted Adivasi filmmaker.
For Leela, an indigenous filmmaker carries the responsibility of being honest towards the community they come from. She believes lived experience creates a different understanding, one that can’t always be gained through external observation.
For generations, she says, Adivasi histories have been narrated by outsiders. Cinema provides an opportunity to reclaim those narratives and allow communities to tell their own stories.
Her long-pending project on Karinthandan comes from this very desire. Karinthandan, a legendary Paniya tribal leader from Wayanad, has often been represented through a particular historical narrative, as someone who helped the British build the Thamarassery Ghat. But while researching the character, Leela found herself questioning that version of history. The more she studied, the more questions emerged. Although the film has not yet materialised, the project remains close to her. The research and preparation she completed continue to shape her understanding of history and storytelling.
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When conversations turn towards contemporary films portraying Adivasi communities, Leela mentions Narivetta. Leela says she liked the film and appreciated its attempt. However, she also felt certain portions lacked authenticity. Her concern is not about the intention of filmmakers. It is the distance between representation and reality.
“There are many artists among us,” she says. Leela questions why filmmakers often choose people from outside the community, transform their appearance through makeup and costumes, and recreate Adivasi identities on screen. If there are talented performers within the community, she wonders, why are they not given those opportunities?
Long before she became a filmmaker, Leela found a place that changed the direction of her life – Kanavu. She joined the alternative education initiative when she was six years old. Unlike conventional schools, Kanavu did not restrict learning to classrooms and textbooks. Education happened through experiences. Children travelled, observed, created and learned through music, theatre, farming, martial arts and films.
Cinema was part of their learning process. She remembers watching several films there, including classics from world cinema. Those screenings slowly created a curiosity within her. Watching films became the desire to make films.
Kanavu, she says, gave her something beyond formal education, it gave her the confidence to explore. Her first major exposure to filmmaking came through K. J. Baby’s film Guda, where she worked as an associate director. That experience introduced her to the world behind the camera, the process of scripting, shooting and shaping a story.
It was then that she understood cinema as more than an artistic medium. It was a movement. However, creating films from the margins comes with challenges that extend beyond the creative process.
Leela Santhosh On Cinema, History And Reclaiming Adivasi Stories
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Recognition does not always translate into opportunities. When it comes to indigenous cinema, Leela feels that there is appreciation once a work is completed, but the journey before that, finding producers, securing financial support and convincing people to trust a new filmmaker remains difficult. For many filmmakers from marginalised communities, the struggle is not only creating art but finding someone willing to invest in that art.
She also points out that discrimination exists across different spaces. Cultural institutions, like other sectors, are influenced by social and political structures. Different political leanings and biases often affect who receives opportunities and who gets excluded.
As we near the end of our conversation, I ask what she would tell a young girl who dreams of becoming a filmmaker. There was a brief pause on the other end. She chuckles softly, as if maybe gathering her thoughts, before answering.
“Don’t be anxious,” she says. Life itself is uncertain, she explains. Creativity should not become a competition. Art is not a race where one person has to defeat another. People can have different opinions about films. Criticism is necessary. But the purpose of creating art should not be proving oneself superior to someone else.
“If I can walk this path,” she says, “those who come after me can run.” Perhaps those words captures Leela Santhosh’s journey better than any introduction.
Leela Santhosh, Kerala’s pioneering Adivasi filmmaker.
