Documentaries They Won’t Let You Watch In India
Every two years, the Film’s Division (of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting) organizes India’s oldest and largest showcase of non-fiction, short fiction and animation: the Mumbai International Film Festival. This year’s festival was held from January 28 and February 3, featuring 800 titles. However, this number excludes several acclaimed independent documentaries that were released in recent times — which have viewed India through a critical lens — were missing from the program.
Even though the Films Division Director General and MIFF Director Smita Vats Sharma insisted that there was “no political thought” behind some titles being rejected and others picked, veteran documentary filmmakers feel otherwise.
With its birth in 1990, the then-BIFF was a space to celebrate documentary filmmaking without the requirement of censor certificates. Many films critical of government policies and ideologies were not only selected to be screened at MIFF but also won awards.
This changed in 2003, when a censor certificate was made mandatory for every film to be screened at MIFF. In protest, filmmakers mounted a popular protest festival called ‘Vikalp’ (‘Alternative’). MIFF 2004 rejected 30 of the most outstanding new Indian films made on a range of themes — primarily political; this led to several filmmakers withdrawing their films from MIFF and screened them instead at ‘Vikalp’.
The censorship clause was withdrawn, but reared its head in 2016 differently: films critical of the ruling ideology were not selected to be for MIFF. For MIFF 2020, several films were excluded from being screened, including two which had qualified for the Academy Awards (the Oscars). Several others could have been possibly left out because of their content.
According to critically acclaimed filmmaker Anand Patwardhan — whose documentary film Reason/Vivek won the Best Feature-Length Documentary Award at the International Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2018 — filed a petition in the Bombay High Court asking the government to show cause as to why his film was rejected from all categories at MIFF. His co-petitioner was Pankaj Rishi Kumar whose documentary Janani’s Juliet had won the Best Long Documentary Award at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kerala. Both Reason/Vivek and Janani’s Juliet were the ones that had qualified for the Oscars.
Even though the petition was dismissed by the Bombay High Court, the protests continued: award-winning filmmaker Anjali Monteiro wrote on Facebook why many of her colleagues from the documentary fraternity had chosen to stay away from MIFF 2020. She wrote: “I have attended almost every MIFF from the first one in 2000, except for MIFF 2004, which had covert censorship of films (sic), to resist which we organized ‘Vikalp’ as a parallel screening space and a movement of documentary filmmakers against censorship. It is the same this time round. A large body of very significant work has been left out, because it is critical of the present dispensation, or because it deals with “uncomfortable” themes (refugees, same-sex love, caste violence, etc) or because it does not conform to conventional notions of a “documentary”. The list of films left out is long. No doubt, every festival has to make a selection and cannot show all the films it receives. But when it is clear that there is a pattern behind the exclusion, it is time for us to take note. MIFF is funded by tax payers’ money and should not become a space that is shaped by the ideology of the party in power, but unfortunately it has become so. Not enough filmmakers are protesting against this shrinking of spaces for critical viewpoints, cutting-edge work, dialogue and debate.”
Monteiro— who has together written about resisting censorship through documentary films, along with KP Jayasankar — went on to list some of the films that were excluded with the hashtag #FilmsTheyDoNotWantYouToSee, thus asking readers of the list (and viewers of the films) to “make up their own minds about whether there is censorship at work or not.”
Here is the list of excluded films:
1) REASON/VIVEK
A chilling account of how murder and institutional controls are being applied to systematically dismantle secular democracy. (trailer link)
Director, Camera, Editing: Anand Patwardhan
Duration: 218mins
Festivals: 16
Awards: 2, and being qualified for the Oscars 2020
2) JANANI’S JULIET
A critical reflection and commentary on gender, caste and class in the contemporary Indian society where love struggles to survive, based on a Pondicherry theatre group’s re-enactment of an honour killing. (trailer link)
Director, Camera: Pankaj Rishi Kumar
Duration: 53mins
Festivals: 8
Awards: 2, and being qualified for the Oscars 2020
3) OUR GAURI
Follows assassinated journalist Gauri Lankesh’s political journey, envisaging what she stood for and her struggle for communal harmony until her last breath. (full film)
Director: Pradeep K P (Deepu)
Duration: 68mins
4) AMMI
On the fight for justice, by the mother of Najeeb, who disappeared in October 2016 from JNU after being attacked by the right-wing ABVP students’ union. (film promo page)
Director: Sunil Kumar
Duration: 90mins
5) WE HAVE NOT COME HERE TO DIE
Traces the mobilization of students across the country, a powerful anti-caste movement, following the death of PhD scholar Rohith Vemula, who was compelled to end his life when he was triggered by Hindu supremacists and a partisan University administration. (film promo page)
Director: Deepa Dhanraj
Camera: Navroze Contractor
Editing: Jabeen Merchant
Duration: 98mins
Festivals: 6
6) DILLI, YADON KI MEHFIL (Delhi, A Gathering of Memories)
A film on the plural and syncretic history of Delhi based on interviews with 15 senior citizens and scholars. (trailer link)
Director: Yousuf Saeed
Duration: 57mins
7) BIRHA/ABSENCE
Guided by Shiv Kumar Batalvi’s birha poetry, the film captures the pain, lamentation and yearning caused by separation, searching for missing people, who left their homes to work in faraway cities, and still have not returned.
Director: Ekta Mittal
Duration: 80mins
Festivals: 8
8) CITIZEN NAGAR
Built as a temporary refugee camp after the 2002 Gujarat carnage, Citizen Nagar in Ahmedabad is now a slum colony for the survivors of the Naroda Patiya massacre, banished there to await justice or death by slow poisoning from the adjoining garbage dump.
Director: Debolina Majumdar
Duration: 52mins
9) CORAL WOMAN
The filmmaker’s journey with Uma, a certified scuba diver, exploring the underwater world and the ongoing threat to the coral reefs of Gulf of Mannar, India, due to indiscriminate industrialisation. (trailer link)
Director: Priya Thuvassery
Duration: 52mins
Festivals: 20
Awards: 4
10) SHUT UP SONA
A tongue-in-cheek take at a feisty female singer’s unrelenting fight for an equal space in modern day India, a country deeply uncomfortable with her emancipation. (trailer link)
Director: Deepti Gupta
Duration: 85mins
Festivals: 2
Awards: 1
11) IF SHE BUILT A COUNTRY
The film follows the brave adivasi women of Raigarh, Chhattisgarh as they struggle not only to save their lands and livelihoods from the mining corporations, seeking justice for themselves, their communities and future generations. (trailer link)
Director: Maheen Mirza
Duration: 60mins
12) CHAI DARBARI
Chai Darbari is a small tapestry of conversations at a teashop in Ayodhya, which bear witness to its tumultuous history, interspersed with politically motivated videos, circulated on WhatsApp, that overlook the multiple lived realities of the residents.
Director: Prateek Shekhar
Duration: 29mins
Awards: 1
13) THE DEATH OF US
Reflects on a range of cases of death penalty, confronting larger ethical and moral questions across time and space. (trailer link)
Director: Vani Subramaniam
Duration: 76mins
14) S.D. : SAROJ DUTTA AND HIS TIMES
A communist poet and radical journalist, a secret State killing, an attempted revolution sparked in the village of Naxalbari at the Himalayan foothills. Setting out to tell the story of the slain revolutionary Saroj Dutta (lovingly known as comrade S.D.), the film gets drawn into a vortex of his tumultuous times, tracing turns and twists of the communist movement in India over three decades. (trailer link)
Directors: Kasturi Basu and Mitali Biswas
Duration: 115mins
Festivals: 4
Awards: 1
15) STAINS
This short fiction film examines the portrayal of menstrual blood through the eyes of the people who bleed, those who assign discriminatory connotations to this blood; and in turn the medium of film and how it is used to represent blood and the relationships that surround it. (trailer link)
Director: Rhea Mathews
Duration: 30mins
Festivals: 2
Awards: 10
16) DISPLACEMENT & RESILIENCE: WOMEN LIVE FOR A NEW DAY
Focusing on the resilience of women refugees, it tells the stories of women forced to flee from four countries of origin: Philippines, Myanmar, Tibet and Syria.
Executive Producer: Chandita Mukherjee, in collaboration with directors Afrah Shafiq, Archana Kapoor, Erika Rae Cruz, Eva Anandi Brownstein and Khedija Lemkecher
Duration: 60mins
Festivals: 3
Awards: 1
17) RECASTING SELVES
Set at CREST (the Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation) in Kozhikode, Kerala — the film documents the ‘soft skills’ training of Dalit and Adivasi post-graduate students in a nurturing campus environment as preparation for their employment in the new Indian economy. (trailer link)
Director: Lalit Vachani
Duration: 80mins
Festivals: 5
18) THAT CLOUD NEVER LEFT
In a not-so-faraway village, people use discarded reels of 35-mm film to make loud toys such as rattlers, whistles and whirligigs. Every day several hundred toys are crafted, and for each of these hundred toys they splice, slit and rip filmstrips. As they follow this routine with uninterrupted monotony, a few narratives leak out from the shredded analogues of film and infuse the place with phantasmagoria. (an article about the film)
Director: Yashaswini R.
Duration: 65mins
Festivals: 6
Awards: 3
19) JHARIA
This documentary is about the 85-year-old Simon Uraon, the Water Man from Jharkhand, who has been working relentlessly on water management and environmental protection, since he was fourteen. (trailer link)
Director: Biju Toppo
Duration: 28mins
20) SIKHIRNI MWSANAI (Dance of the Butterfly)
The film creates a landscape of the troupe Sifung Harimu Afad’s world by following their rehearsals for Bwisagu, the spring festival. In a place steeped with a history of cyclic conflict and violence, the film attempts to understand the relationship between cultural forms and everyday life, and what they mean to a community. (trailer link)
Director: Subasri Krishnan
Duration: 65mins
21) MUNDARI SRISHTIKATHA
Folklore is an integral part of the living tradition of indigenous communities. This short animation film is a tribute to the Munda community and their ancestors.
Director: Tuhin Paul
Producer: Meghnath Akhra
22) GAY INDIA MATRIMONY
What if one as a queer individual in India decides to test the marriage market for themselves? How would one’s friends, family, acquaintances react to their decision? The idea is to turn the camera inwards, look at intimate and public spaces, and see how our choices regarding marriage and candidate selection are shaped; how our caste, class, religious locations intersect those desires. When two same sex desiring person, dare to ask more than mere concessional tolerance, does it upset the order? (trailer link)
Director: Debalina Majumder
23) TAALA TE KUNJE/LOCK AND KEY
Five recovering addicts at a rehabilitation center in Punjab, India, are helping families recover from the rampant drug problem in the state. While they struggle to establish new relationships with their pasts, their wives strive to redefine the meaning of love and the labor of everyday. (full film)
Director: Shilpi Gulati
Festivals: 4
Awards: 2
