A Squamish man has a role in an award-winning and empowering documentary about the burgeoning success of women from India in extreme sports.
Project Wild Women won best documentary at the 2019 Kenya International Sports Film Festival, which was held in the last week of November.
The film features 14 Indian women across 11 different extreme and alternative sports, battling a culture that often doesn't welcome or support their achievements.
Squamish's Rick Meloff, photographer and videographer at onecutmedia.ca spent eight days shooting Pemberton freeride mountain biker, Anita Naidu, in Whistler in the summer of 2018 for the documentary.
"It is kind of cool I got involved with something that is better for women," Meloff told The Chief.
"It is weird to think of it, living in Squamish, because there is no segregation of what you can and can't do. You just do. It is Canada. You just do. I guess they are still fighting with it [in some places]."
Naidu is featured and narrates in the film.
"Twenty-five years ago it seemed impossible that anyone would care about the dreams of young brown girls — to refashion society, slay it’s more ferocious demons and hope for the emergence of a new world," Naidu said on her Facebook page. "But an activist is anyone who reappears consistently, against all odds because of their fidelity to a bigger battle. And my sisters-in-crime defy bias, tradition, dismissal, lack of privilege, expectation and every other thing that gets thrown at them. May it give audiences... philosophical tools to see the world as it ought to be and the courage to fight for it — in the trivial and strategic."
The project also won a People's Choice award in 2018 at the IMF Mountain Film Festival, and was featured on the IMF Mountain Film Festival 2018 Tour across India.
For more on the film, go to www.inspirecrew.com/project-wild-women.
