By Our Staff
Amazon Prime Video has released a new session of Maitri: Female First Collective. The collective is an endeavour to help build a community for women from media and entertainment where they can come together to discuss their experiences, challenges and successes, and offer their perspective and advice on how to bring about a positive shift.
Moderated by the creator and curator of Maitri, Smriti Kiran, the participants comprised Aparna Purohit, Creator – Maitri and Head of India Originals, Prime Video; Indhu VS, Writer & Director; Ratheena Plathottathil, Writer, Director & Producer; Elahe Hiptoola, Creator & Producer; Parvathy Thiruvothu, Actor & Director; Rima Kallingal, Actor, Producer & Performing Artist; Shreya Dev Dube, Filmmaker & Cinematographer and Neha Parti Matiyani, Cinematographer.
Said Aparna Purohit, head of India originals, Prime Video: “With the new session of Maitri, we wanted to take stock of where we stand with respect to diversity, equity and inclusion, understand the challenges ahead, and collaborate to find the right solutions. We are very heartened by the encouragement and support we have received for Maitri: Female First Collective so far. While it is a gradual journey, I am happy to see some change already coming through. To hear things like ‘we have women writers in our writers’ rooms’, or ‘our women characters have agency’ and ‘our content will definitely pass the Bechdel test’, in conversations with creators, for me, is a major step in the right direction. At Prime Video, we remain deeply committed to DEI. As the next step, we want to strive to have at least 30% women HODs across all our productions.”