Forced to Play is a visual exploration of the female character portrayals through the body dynamics portrayed in contemporary romantic comedies (2021-2024). With subtle progression, it reveals that there is mundanity to the ways in which female agency is undermined. Patterns emerge when we deconstruct how women are portrayed in relation to their male counterparts - a characterisation that is made obvious through recurring body-language.
Dissecting these narratives, the project Playdate invites viewers to reconsider what the depiction of female empowerment truly means in the stories we consume and to recognise the complexities hidden beneath the charm of romantic comedies.

Making this visual essay and the book resulted from an long process of watching, observing and deconstructing over a hundred films. To keep a track of romantic-comedy films, I created a database that kept a record of movies that were released from the year 2021 till 2024. This database helped narrow my scope of research and filter factors that helped me focus my visual data collection further.
The process of editing this film is an extended form of typologising moving images till the unseen patterns emerged. It is a way of decontextualising the film scenes used to create a narrative, now spliced to form a new one. 
The book functions as a secondary derivative, isolating and tracing the body movements and gestures extracted directly from the films. A simple attempt at driving the point of the existing pseudo post-feminist culture further.