View source for Hetall Dedhhia

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[[Category:India |D ]]
[[Category:Cinema-TV-Pop |D ]]

=A brief biography= 
==As in 2024==
[https://epaper.indiatimes.com/article-share?article=02_06_2024_024_035_cap_TOI  June 2, 2024: ''The Times of India'']


''' Hetall Dedhhia, Hindi cinema’s first woman gaffer '''

➤ Clad in a white T-shirt and shorts, Hetall Dedhhia shows Ashraf, a light boy, how to create the effect of a car headlight passing over the windscreen of another car. He listens intently as she effortlessly rotates a 2kg bulky light called Pan Car to make a ﬂamboyant arc on the wall. Then she hands him the light and moves around the room full of men to diffuse, distribute and dismantle power in more ways than one.

 ➤ “It took a little time for people to adjust to a woman in this role but when they realised I knew my stuff, they soon accepted this new presence on set,” says 39-year-old in a video that shows her dragging crates of equipment across the ﬂoor, folding cables, unfolding carpets, and sharing a chai break with her all-male crew. “I like getting my hands dirty,” says Hetall who became Hindi cinema’s ﬁrst and only woman gaffer nearly two decades ago when few knew what the term meant. 

➤ Informal British slang for the head of a work crew, ‘gaffer’ refers to the head lighting designer. “Our job is to make the cinematographer’s artistic vision come true creatively,” she says.

 ➤ “My father was and is the school for the country,” says Hetall, daughter of renowned gaffer Mulchand Dedhia, who used to work as an electrician at weddings before observing light dadas while laying cables on set. The youngest of four, Hetall was all of nine when she watched in awe as the moon box — a massive light mounted on a 100-foot crane — rose up after an entire day’s rigging to illuminate the sets of Shekhar Kapoor’s ‘Bandit Queen’. It was during the shoot of Mira Nair’s 1996 release ‘Fire’ that she keenly watched her father give instructions to the lightmen. Hetal dropped out of education after tenth grade and spent college life playing snooker at a gaming club — something girls didn’t do then. Then, she decided to do something else that girls didn’t do by following in her father’s footsteps. “Gafﬁng drew me because no woman was doing it,” she says.

 ➤ Acutely aware of the grunt work the job entailed, her father wasn’t thrilled by her decision. He tried to convince her that it was a job meant for men. To prove her mettle, she accompanied her father to Kolkata for the two-monthshoot of a German ﬁlm called ‘Shadows Of Time’. “Actors and crew members were intrigued. They had never seen a woman in that job before,” says Hetall, recalling her ﬁrst day as a trainee.

 ➤ While some of the mood depended on the sun, a whole lot of it, as she learnt, depended on the stars. Film stars, that is. “Stars are so overpowering that we, directors or DOPs, do not get a chance to do our respective creative jobs,” she says in ‘Changemakers,’ a book by Gayatri Rangachari Shah and Mallika Kapur in which she was featured as one of 20 women transforming the Hindi ﬁlm industry behind the scenes. “The norm now is to make people work overtime,” Hetall told TOI. “We work for 18 hours and even 22 hours at times. I don’t get this. Are we working in the army?” 

➤ Among the projects she is proud of working on are Mira Nair’s ‘Nafas’, a ﬁlm on Qatari pearl divers, ‘Un + Une’ a French ﬁlm by the legendary cinematographer Claude Lelouch apart from ‘Mission Impossible 5’. “I’ll tell you what doesn’t come to the table... ego doesn’t come to the table,” says cinematographer Jason West about Hetall in ‘Changemakers’.

 ➤ Watching the plight of her fellow crew members has sparked in her an urge to take up the good ﬁght. “Gaffers have absolutely no value in our industry,” says an exasperated Hetall. “People only wake up when a lightman falls to his death. Such accidents can be easily prevented by putting rules and regulations in place. But lightmen have no insurance or safety norms and they never will unless I stand up for them,” believes Hetall, who plans to start a union that would lobby on behalf of invisible, overworked crew members including the spotboys.

 Curated by Ketaki Desai and Sharmila Ganesan Ram