‘Mala Aai Vhaychay’ (I Want To Be A Mother) is a film based on a true story that unfolds into rural India and poignantly raises all the sensitive issues and the commercialization surrounding Surrogacy.
A foreigner, Mary, is lured into India with the hope of finding an easy target mother for her wish to bear a child. Her dream of motherhood takes her to meet a poor Yashoda, who is selected to be a surrogate mother.
As her pregnancy advances to five & a half months, the doctors examining her express a fear of her giving birth to a handicapped child. This raises a storm in Mary’s life and she decides not to be a mother to a handicapped child and returns to her country.
What happens thereafter to Yashoda, her emotional battles, her physical struggles, the birth of the child, the moral questions that arise during the course of the surrogacy and ultimately, the rights of a mother and the law of the land that plays a pivotal role in deciding as to whom should the child belong to, are all the delicate and pertinent issues that are ever so sensitively portrayed in the film.
A simple and natural wish of a woman to be a mother, albeit through surrogacy, is the theme of the film which ends up as a canvas that brings to the fore the struggles of motherhood and touches the core of the social realities, finally resting in the lap of the movie-goers and leaving them with an impact that provokes true & deep thinking.
The strong and very relevant philosophy that the film drives across is that it is not just a mother who gives birth to a child, but it is also a child that gives birth to and makes a mother!
