Earlier this year, history was created when India’s The Elephant Whisperers bagged the country’s very first Academy Award. It came for the Best Documentary Short film.
It was a sentimental moment for Indian documentary filmmakers as it meant that Indian documentaries had finally arrived on the acclaimed world stage and got their due.
Against that background, the 54th edition of IFFI’s in-conversation session titled 'Indian Documentary on the World Stage', was well attended and had documentary enthusiasts Miriam Chandy Menachery, Kartiki Gonsalves, Sai Abishek, Nilotpal Majumdar and RV Ramani talking about the legacy, challenges and future of Indian documentaries.
It was refreshing to hear the session’s moderator, Anshul Chaturvedi, confess that he was amazed at the optimism and consistency documentary filmmakers have shown over the years, given the tight budgets and the years of work they put into a single project to not even end up with a huge fortune.
“It’s a new-found respect I have for the documentary space,” he admitted.
Kartiki spent five years making The Elephant Whisperers, which despite its Indian tone, gained wide acceptance for the universal human emotion it carried.
“There’s a perception that documentaries aren’t entertaining. How do you change that view point, maybe introduce and educate audiences on the different types of documentaries,” Kartiki, obviously the star of the session, said, adding that even post the Oscar award, funding remains a significant issue faced by documentary filmmakers like herself.
“As a filmmaker, I wear too many hats,” said Miriam, who often ends up being her own director, producer and distributor to her documentary films.
“Each filmmaker embarks on an intensive journey over a long timeline and with quite expensive resources which becomes difficult to sustain, there needs to be a collaborative ecosystem. We need to create a self-sustaining model and attach a value to documentaries,” she added.
“Documentary equals to no money,” agreed Kartiki, who went on to say that being viewed as art, it somehow leads to documentary filmmakers' pay checks reduced to half.
Just like mainstream cinema that draws an audience to their theatrical releases, panelists felt real life stories need to have that solid audience and appropriate efforts need to be taken to preserve this rich source of information.
To build a documentary culture in a country like India, Sai Abishek, head of factual and lifestyle cluster, South Asia, Warner Bros, believes there needs to be a community to support each other, and as an industry, help and fund newcomers. He also spoke of building on distribution channels so that documentaries becomes part of the regular conversation.
“Newcomers need to invest time in learning the craft,” suggested renowned cinematographer Nilotpal, who pointed out that India lacks a standalone documentary school or any national funding and even Doordarshan had no slot for documentaries.
As the panel opened for audience questions, Armstrong Pane, the Director (films) in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, who was in attendance assured the panelists of the ministry launching a short-term course in documentary filmmaking, and a time slot on Doordarshan to feature award-winning documentaries.
He also highlighted that a fund of Rs 20 crore had been made available at IFFI’s Film Bazaar for film production.
While people walk in theatres hoping to get immersed in the film, thus forgetting reality, maybe documentaries being true to facts would let one engage to that same world.
So while the future of Indian documentaries banks on generating revenue and being celebrated in the country and the world, what’s important is focusing on making an authentic film.
Like RV Ramani said, “Maybe the world stage is you. You do it for yourself. When you make a film you want to, that’s already profit.”