indian documentaries: Why India hardly does documentaries

India has the world’s largest feature film industry. Yet, the state of its independent, especially documentary, filmmaking is not so rosy. It certainly doesn’t lack talent. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix at Cannes last month. Nishtha Jain‘s Farming the Revolution and Vinay Shukla’s While We Watched picked up awards this year. Yet, last year’s Oscar-winning The Elephant Whisperers was a rare documentary that was genuinely homegrown. Anurag Kashyap is right when he recently noted that ‘India has stopped supporting such cinema, the kind of cinema that was at Cannes,’ adding that the country’s talent lies in ‘picking up credit’ once the international accolades have come in.

Kapadia’s film, supported by a French fund, didn’t receive the rebate promised by India. Sandhya Suri’s crime thriller Santosh, which premiered at Cannes, was backed by UK Film Lottery Fund. Even when these films secure international distribution, they aren’t shown in India, depriving not just directors of home audiences but also viewers of non-mainstream cinema. The West dominates what is funded and screened. Film selections often align with PC agendas of Indian film festivals that prefer to play it safe.

The Indian state’s – and, by extension, the public’s – disinterest in independent films and documentaries that highlight ‘problems’, isn’t new. Satyajit Ray’s 1971 documentary, Sikkim, commissioned by the chogyal (king) of Sikkim on perceived threats to the then-country’s sovereignty from China and India, was banned by GoI. The ban was lifted in 2010. In this era of internet and streaming films, when movies can be ‘sourced’ and viewers have ‘fluid’ locations, a mature society must be able to watch all kinds of PoVs, uncomfortable ones included.