As the Indian general elections reach a frenetic pitch this month, the Indian documentary is bagging the most prestigious awards in North America and Canada. This is significant because it demonstrates the clout of the Indian documentary on the world stage and at the same time, these films are a reflection of some of the biggest election issues in the country.
Veteran documentary filmmaker Nishtha Jain’s film on the farmers’ protest Farming the Revolution won the Best International Feature at Canada’s Hot Docs, an Academy Award qualifying festival, automatically placing the film in the run for Best Feature Documentary. Nishtha feels vindicated because she faced so many rejections in the lead-up to being accepted at Hot Docs.
“There were several disappointments before we were selected at Hot Docs. Rejections are hard especially when you’ve worked so hard, risked your life and savings to make a film. But at the same time, we have to realise that we are competing with hundreds of other films. The interest and knowledge of the programme organisers about your society, its politics and history is a very important factor. One organiser in an A-list festival asked to know the scale of the farmer protests. Another asked why should there be another film on the farmer protests, there are already a few. But do they ever question why Holocaust films are still being made. It’s not a level playing field. The West still controls what is funded and screened from the global South. In addition, film selections also have to satisfy the politically correct agenda of the festivals. Many film festivals also play safe,” Nishtha tells TNM.
This is the reality of Indian documentary filmmakers who pick up burning issues in the country and then try to navigate festivals and international markets independently. Even for someone like Nishtha, who is a well-known name from India and also at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the largest documentary film festival in the world that has supported her work consistently with grants. Her last work, The Golden Thread on the jute mills of West Bengal, was screened in the Masters category reserved for veterans at the IDFA. In fact, through its IDFA Bertha Fund for developing countries, the Amsterdam festival has been incubating the talent we have seen emerging from Asia, opening up the European market for distribution to Indian filmmakers.
The North American funds, festivals, and consequently markets have only recently woken up to support talent from Asia with the recent push for diversity and inclusion. Nishtha became one of the first to be inducted into the jury for the Academy Awards but it has taken her a few years to see her own film stand a chance at these Awards as younger talent from India had their documentaries shortlisted and nominated for the Oscars after they won awards at the Sundance Film Festival, which is once again an Academy Award qualifying festival.
Writing with Fire, All that Breathes, Against the Tide are Indian documentaries that premiered and won awards at Sundance in three consecutive years and then found themselves in the Academy Awards race. It is ironic that India only began to take notice of this genre when it squeezed itself past the very narrow gate for documentary at the Academy Awards that hardly places emphasis on the genre. In the 24 categories of the Academy Awards, only two are for documentary – Best Feature Documentary and Best Short Documentary, the rest of the categories revolve around fiction.
Mainstream film industry is taking note
The recent spate of successes, including The Elephant Whisperers receiving the first Academy Award for Documentary Short from India, has made the home audience wake up to the global power and clout of the Indian documentary. The mainstream industry too is taking note for two reasons. Firstly, India is the biggest producer of fiction films in the world with little to no support for documentaries, which can be produced with far less budget and risk. Behind every film that gets nominated is a determined story of filmmakers taking on great odds and financial risk to attain this rare achievement. For every success, there are many good documentaries that do not make it past the gatekeepers of the biggest festivals and remain undiscovered gems with little to no revenue streams.
Secondly, even if a documentary does manage to qualify for the Academy Awards, it is difficult to launch a successful campaign bolstered by budgets to hold its own amidst the hype, hoopla, and PR machinery that make it a hurdle race to make it past every voting milestone. The Indian documentary making it to the final few means that besides the sheer chutzpah, funding and international support has grown over the years.
Ironically, although these films are able to secure international distribution, this does not guarantee that they will get distribution in India. Nishtha says, “Farming the Revolution holds up a mirror for what India can be. It’s a shining example of resistance to fascist forces, and we see empowered people, which is rare. I can’t wait to show it widely in India. But how? That remains to be figured out.”
At the Peabody Awards 2024 conceived by the National Association of Broadcasters USA in 1938 – touted to be the radio industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize – that celebrate ‘stories that matter’, two Indian films are tied in the Best Documentary category. All that Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen about two Muslim brothers who run a bird clinic in Delhi amidst the backdrop of pollution and a city gripped by communal conflict, and While We Watched by Vinay Shukla, doggedly following senior journalist Ravish Kumar staying true to his profession amidst the NDTV takeover by Adani.
Immersive storytelling, not just ‘voice of God’
Vinay says the Peabody is not something he expected as his film premiered in September 2022 at Toronto and since then he has been lowering his expectations, but he is instead overwhelmed by the love the film has got worldwide. “Undeniably Indian documentary filmmakers have taken the challenge of telling stories that matter to them and matter to their people and delivering those stories with utmost imagination and cinematic craft. No doubt we are here because of the previous generation of filmmakers who have laid the track for us, but this generation has taken a lot of risks.”
Shaunak says, “It is very rare that one shares such a venerated award with another member of one’s own community, so it feels very special. Also I really enjoy the fact that Vinay and I have two completely different approaches, both social and cinematic. We have been good friends for many years now, right from our first films. So there is the joy and pleasure of growing together and yet working on our own particular tastes and skill sets and to be here together at this juncture.”
It is true that the filmmakers have embraced completely different and distinct styles of storytelling and the Indian documentary is no longer about the one ‘voice of God’ that feeds the audience information, but rather about authorship and immersive storytelling. Shaunak’s film reaching the final Academy Award nomination backed by HBO meant he had the steam to take on the Academy Award race. Since HBO was not available in India, he was also able to broker a tie-up with Hotstar to boost visibility in the country. He says, “The fact that All that Breathes did not have just a rare festival run or theatrical run internationally but is available for whoever wants to see it first on Hotstar – and now on Jio – means a huge deal, because the number of people who reach out are not just the ones interested in niche arthouse cinema but people who happen to chance on the film. It allows for a far larger conversation.”
Vinay’s film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and had theatrical runs in both the UK and the US. It was released in New York the same time as Barbie and Oppenheimer and still there were long enough queues for While We Watched, so much so that the guard at the theatre was curious about the film. This was again repeated at its India premiere at the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) Festival that saw a strong turnout for his documentary as well as for all the other documentaries that were curated alongside fiction.
From legendary documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s most recent film about his Gandhian roots The World is Family to well-known Bollywood director Vikramaditya Motwane’s Indi(r)a’s Emergency to Nishtha’s The Golden Thread, Vinay’s While We Watched and Sarvnik Kaur’s Against the Tide, the strength, spectrum, and growing popularity of the documentary genre was apparent. The top award at MAMI, in fact, went to Against the Tide, a lyrical documentary about the effects of climate change on the Koli fishing community in Mumbai, produced by Koval Bhatia.
Finding distribution in India
The demand for documentaries is very clearly visible and waiting for distribution, but it will require courage beyond banking on true crime as the only genre that is catching all the eyeballs for big ticket OTT platforms.
Vinay has finally found a home for While We Watched on Mubi, which offers a good curation of independent films but with very limited revenue. Similarly, Payal Kapadia made her last documentary that premiered at Cannes, A Night of Knowing Nothing about student protests at the Film and Television Institute of India, after a successful festival run on Criterion and Apple TV. Just recently, she made headlines by winning the Grand Prix at Cannes for her fiction debut All We Imagine as Light, a story around Malayali nurses and their sisterhood of survival in Mumbai. She has already secured North American distribution and having chosen Malayalam and Hindi as the language of the film is fairly assured of distribution in India because of the popularity of Malayalam cinema on OTT. She has been giving interviews with her cast about Malayalam cinema creating a viable model to embrace a wide spectrum of themes that is both self-sustaining and fulfilling for the contemporary filmmaker. This may be a clue to creating a new distribution model for the documentary as well, which is author-driven and has an assured audience.
Meanwhile, spurred by the recent success of documentaries, a fresh crop of young talent is emerging. What is less known and commendable is how these younger Indian filmmakers have finally grown past competition and are collaborating to complete their films and find financing and distribution. Over the last few years, a number of documentary collectives have burgeoned helping filmmakers share resources, networks, and best practices. This has brought in a fresh boost of energy and camaraderie to a genre that until now was a very individualistic and lonely journey of creative entrepreneurship.
The journey has just got more interesting with the documentary exploring new narrative approaches, finding support from production houses that until now only funded fiction, and all the time gathering an audience hungry for real and rooted contemporary stories.
Miriam Chandy Menacherry is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and Fulbright-Nehru Scholar for 2024-25. She was chosen as BAFTA Breakthrough Talent for 2023-24 for her documentaries From the Shadows and The Leopard’s Tribe.
Views expressed are the author’s own.