Driving with Selvi is a bi-lingual documentary (English and Kannada) which tells the incredible journey of Selvi, a child bride who escaped her marriage and made a life for herself. India's first woman cab driver, Selvi, who is now 32, runs a transport business near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.
Canadian filmmaker Elisa Paloschi first met Selvi in the year 2004 when she was a tourist in Mysuru. The filmmaker, who says she hadn't made a film in years, was inspired enough by Selvi's journey to follow her story for a decade and make the film.
Canadian filmmaker Elisa Paloschi first met Selvi in the year 2004 when she was a tourist in Mysuru. The filmmaker, who says she hadn't made a film in years, was inspired enough by Selvi's journey to follow her story for a decade and make the film.
- 12/9/2017
- by TNM NEWS
- The News Minute
Elisa Paloschi’s inspiring documentary charts the rise of Selvi, a hugely likable taxi driver, and her tough route out of a forced marriage and towards independence
This Canadian-produced, South India-set documentary opens with some depressing statistics about forced marriage, and how 700 million women worldwide were married before they turned 18; 250 million of them before they turned 15. From this dour beginning, director Elisa Paloschi manages to fashion a lightfooted, feelgood film about one girl who got away, and the confident, convention-challenging woman that girl became. When protagonist Selvi was 14, her brother married her off to a man who tortured her and forced her into prostitution. Luckily, she escaped and found her way to a girls’ home, where the forward-thinking people who ran it gave her a chance to learn how to drive. Years later, she became the first female taxi driver in Karnataka, found a husband and started a family. One...
This Canadian-produced, South India-set documentary opens with some depressing statistics about forced marriage, and how 700 million women worldwide were married before they turned 18; 250 million of them before they turned 15. From this dour beginning, director Elisa Paloschi manages to fashion a lightfooted, feelgood film about one girl who got away, and the confident, convention-challenging woman that girl became. When protagonist Selvi was 14, her brother married her off to a man who tortured her and forced her into prostitution. Luckily, she escaped and found her way to a girls’ home, where the forward-thinking people who ran it gave her a chance to learn how to drive. Years later, she became the first female taxi driver in Karnataka, found a husband and started a family. One...
- 10/6/2016
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Guardian - Film News
(Pictured l to r: Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Maggie Kiley, Elisa Paloschi, Meera Menon, Malina Saval) Earlier this month, the Geena Davis– and Trevor Drinkwater–founded Bentonville Film Festival, based out of Arkansas, kicked off its second year of pushing inclusive films with female-driven voices into the mainstream. Using research from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which revealed that “across 1,565 content creators, only 7 percent of directors, 13 percent of writers, and 20 percent of producers are female,” a 4.8-to-one male-to-female ratio behind the scenes, 34 films were selected out of 500 for the slate. To shift that ratio in mainstream films, Bff is the only festival that guarantees the winners of the narrative, family film, and audience award categories distribution through corporate sponsors that include AMC and Walmart. “Having been in movies that really resonated with women, I had a bit of a spidey-sense of how we were portrayed,” Davis said. “The...
- 5/16/2016
- backstage.com
Driving with Selvi
Written & Directed by Elisa Paloschi
Canada, 2015
Director Elisa Paloschi’s documentary film, Driving with Selvi, tells the story of Selvi, a former child bride who escaped an abusive marriage to become South India’s first female taxi driver. The story unfolds over ten years and provides the audience with an unobstructed view of the life of a woman born into second-class citizenry. In Driving with Selvi, Paloschi crafts the type of inspirational film that will help motivate viewers to tackle the obstacles holding them back in their own lives.
Driving with Selvi opens with a startling fact: 250 million women alive in the world today were married before they were 15 years old — one third of them living in India. The film then quickly introduces the eponymous Selvi, a shy South Indian teenager with a soft-spoken demeanour and a 1000-watt smile. When Selvi turned 14, her brother married her off...
Written & Directed by Elisa Paloschi
Canada, 2015
Director Elisa Paloschi’s documentary film, Driving with Selvi, tells the story of Selvi, a former child bride who escaped an abusive marriage to become South India’s first female taxi driver. The story unfolds over ten years and provides the audience with an unobstructed view of the life of a woman born into second-class citizenry. In Driving with Selvi, Paloschi crafts the type of inspirational film that will help motivate viewers to tackle the obstacles holding them back in their own lives.
Driving with Selvi opens with a startling fact: 250 million women alive in the world today were married before they were 15 years old — one third of them living in India. The film then quickly introduces the eponymous Selvi, a shy South Indian teenager with a soft-spoken demeanour and a 1000-watt smile. When Selvi turned 14, her brother married her off...
- 11/7/2015
- by Victor Stiff
- SoundOnSight
![Driving with Selvi (2015)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjUyN2Q5MWUtMGQxYS00NjE2LWE0YmEtZDQ0M2QzOWQzZGJkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjc1MTU4Nzk@._V1_QL75_UX500_CR0,53,500,281_.jpg)
Canadian filmmaker Elisa Paloschi is premiering her film, Driving With Selvi, at Raindance tonight (Sept 28) in London.
Ten years in the making, the film opens with Selvi in 2004 at a shelter for young women in Mysore, Karnataka, shortly after she has run away from her husband - a timid, softly-spoken 18-year-old rejecting a life she describes as “torture”.
As the years pass by, the film captures her extraordinary transformation as Selvi finds her voice and defies all expectations – learning to drive, starting her own taxi company, leading seminars to educate and empower women in rural areas, marrying again (this time by choice and for love), becoming a mother and, to Selvi’s absolute delight, obtaining her license to drive a passenger bus.
Here is Elisa’s story of filming with Selvi…
There’s no rule in India that women must keep on suffering. That’s what my hopes and plans are all about.
In 2004 I...
Ten years in the making, the film opens with Selvi in 2004 at a shelter for young women in Mysore, Karnataka, shortly after she has run away from her husband - a timid, softly-spoken 18-year-old rejecting a life she describes as “torture”.
As the years pass by, the film captures her extraordinary transformation as Selvi finds her voice and defies all expectations – learning to drive, starting her own taxi company, leading seminars to educate and empower women in rural areas, marrying again (this time by choice and for love), becoming a mother and, to Selvi’s absolute delight, obtaining her license to drive a passenger bus.
Here is Elisa’s story of filming with Selvi…
There’s no rule in India that women must keep on suffering. That’s what my hopes and plans are all about.
In 2004 I...
- 9/28/2015
- ScreenDaily
The fall festival rush is upon us. Locarno is currently ramping up. Venice has released their line-up and Thom Powers and the Toronto International Film Festival team have dropped a bomb with a previously unannounced new feature from powerhouse docu-provocateur Michael Moore. It is truly a miracle that the production of a film such as Moore’s upcoming Where To Invade Next (see still above) managed to go completely undetected by the filmmaking community until it was literally announced to world premiere at one of the largest film festivals in the world. Programmed as a one of the key films in the Special Presentations section at Tiff, the film sees Moore telling “the Pentagon to ‘stand down’ — he will do the invading for America from now on.” Also announced to premiere at Tiff was Avi Lewis’ This Changes Everything, which has slowly been rising up this list, as well as...
- 8/7/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
It’s been a surprisingly interesting month of moving and shaking in terms of doc development. Just a month after making his first public funding pitch at Toronto’s Hot Docs Forum, legendary doc filmmaker Frederick Wiseman took to Kickstarter to help cover the remaining expenses for his 40th feature film In Jackson Heights (see the film’s first trailer below). Unrelentingly rigorous in his determination to capture the American institutional landscape on film, his latest continues down this thematic rabbit hole, taking on the immensely diverse New York City neighborhood of Jackson Heights as his latest subject. According to the Kickstarter page, Wiseman is currently editing the 120 hours of rushes he shot with hopes of having the film ready for a fall festival premiere (my guess would be Tiff, where both National Gallery and At Berkeley made their North American debut), though he’s currently quite a ways away from his $75,000 goal.
- 7/6/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Well folks, after a rather long and brutal winter (at least for me here in Buffalo), we are finally heading into the wonderful warmth of summer, but with that blast of sunshine and steamy humidity comes the mid-year drought of major film fests. After the Sheffield Doc/Fest concludes on June 10th and AFI Docs wraps on June 21st, we likely won’t see any major influx in our charts until Locarno, Venice, Telluride and Tiff announce their line-ups in rapid succession. In the meantime, we can look forward to the intriguing onslaught of films making their debut in Sheffield, including Brian Hill’s intriguing examination of Sweden’s most notorious serial killer, The Confessions of Thomas Quick, and Sean McAllister’s film for which he himself was jailed in the process of making, A Syrian Love Story, the only two films world premiering in the festival’s main competition.
- 6/1/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
It should come as no surprise that Cannes Film Festival will play host to Kent Jones’s doc on the touchstone of filmmaking interview tomes, Hitchcock/Truffaut (see photo above). The film has been floating near the top of this list since it was announced last year as in development, while Jones himself has a history with the festival, having co-written both Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. and Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage To Italy, both of which premiered in Cannes. The film is scheduled to screen as part of the Cannes Classics sidebar alongside the likes of Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words, which will play as part of the festival’s tribute to the late starlet, and Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna’s Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans (see trailer below). As someone who grew up watching road races with my dad in Watkins Glen,...
- 5/1/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Now that the busy winter fest schedule of Sundance, Rotterdam and the Berlinale has concluded, we’ve now got our eyes on the likes of True/False and SXSW. While, True/False does not specialize in attention grabbing world premieres, it does provide a late winter haven for cream of the crop non-fiction fare from all the previously mentioned fests and a selection of overlooked genre blending films presented in a down home setting. This year will mark my first trip to the Columbia, Missouri based fest, where I hope to catch a little of everything, from their hush-hush secret screenings, to selections from their Neither/Nor series, this year featuring chimeric Polish cinema of decades past, to a spotlight of Adam Curtis’s incisive oeuvre. But truth be told, it is SXSW, with its slew of high profile world premieres being announced, such as Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs...
- 2/27/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Turkey or no turkey, these next couple of days lucky filmmakers who’ve been selected to screen as part of the Sundance Film Festival will get the invitation notice straight from John Cooper and the Park City programming team, and thus, those that we’re betting have made the cut have also inched up the list a bit. One of those that seem an obvious choice to premiere at the fest is director Steve Hoover and producer Danny Yourd’s Crocodile Gennadiy. Following up their Grand Jury Prize winning Blood Brother with incredible turnaround time, our new most anticipated film tracks the delicate operations of Gennadiy Mokhnenko, a Ukrainian activist, orphanage manager and savior of countless children whose addict parents favor injected cold medicine and alcohol over them. Part heartwrenching domestic drama, part sleuth thriller, the film looks to use the Ukrainian uprising as a backdrop to highlight its protagonist...
- 11/27/2014
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
The Women in Film Foundation has named recipients of the 29th annual Film Finishing Fund grant, chosen from over one hundred feature-length narrative films, docs and shorts from around the world. Co-chairs are "Words and Pictures" producer Nancy Rae Stone and AFI Associate Dean of Production Betsy Pollock. Narrative Feature Film "I am Nojoom, Age 10 and Divorced" - Khadija Alsalami, Director/Producer Documentary Films "Tyrus Wong: Brushstrokes in Hollywood" - Pamela Tom, Director/Writer/Producer "Journey to Normal: Women of War Come Home" - Julia Hera DeStefano, Director "The Mask You Live In" - Jessica Anthony, Producer "Hardy" - Natasha Verma, Director "Children of Giant" - Evelyn Galan, Producer "A Classy Broad" - Anne Goursaud, Director/Producer/Editor "Driving with Selvi" - Elisa Paloschi, Director Experimental Short Film "Zoetrope" -...
- 11/14/2014
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Thompson on Hollywood
They often get quite a bit less attention than their fictional brethren, and it doesn’t help that many films fly under the radar while development and filming is underway. To chart this course with a little more precision, I’m launching Ioncinema.com’s latest feature, What’s Up Doc?, our monthly Top 50 Most Anticipated films, a sort of hitlist and/or snapshot of the most alluring, the most promising documentary film projects from the established documentarian guard, the new crop of future voices or the fiction filmmakers who on occasion dip their toes in the form. Curated by me, Jordan M. Smith, you’ll find docu items that are in their beginning stages to being moments away from their film festival berth. Like any such list, we can expect film items to fluctuate in ranking, with the cut-off being publicly items — such recent examples include Laura Poitras’s white hot Edward Snowden project,...
- 10/23/2014
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.