Nadja-Christina Schneider

Mimi (2021, dir. Laxman Utekar) is not the first remake of the 2011 Marathi feature film Mala Aai Vhhaychy! (“I want to be a mother”), directed by Samruoddhi Porey. In 2013, a Telugu remake by director Singeetam Srinivasa Rao was released under the title Welcome Obama. Single persons, same-sex and unmarried couples from abroad had already been excluded from legal access to surrogacy in India before the complete ban of commercial surrogacy in 2016. This may partly explain why in the Hindi remake Mimi, it is not a single woman from the United States who commissions the surrogacy, unlike in the Marathi original. Rather, it is now an involuntarily childless married couple who are nevertheless conveniently able to contribute the necessary gametes themselves – sperms, egg cell – on site so that the fertilized egg can then be transferred to Mimi’s uterus in a specialized clinic in Jaipur. Mimi had never planned on becoming a gestational mother but the experience of becoming a mother will change her life forever.

Read the whole article on Doing Sociology: https://doingsociology.org/2022/01/05/becoming-an-altruistic-mother-mimi-now-streaming-on-netflix-and-jio-cinema-but-why-exactly-now-nadja-christina-schneider/