National Award winner Miriam Chandy Menacherry: ‘I belong to a generation that began the new wave of Indian documentary cinema’

(Clockwise from right) Documentary filmmaker Miriam Chandy Menacherry, a still from her film 'From the Shadows', featuring artist-activist Leena Kejriwal, and the film's poster.

When Miriam Chandy Menacherry landed in Austin, Texas (the US), for the international premiere of her documentary From the Shadows (2022), she received orange alerts on her phone, with a description of a girl and where she had gone missing. The helpline numbers were in public toilets. Sometimes, the work you do creates a ripple effect. It took her six years to make the film, which premiered in the National Documentary section at the biennial Mumbai International Film Festival in June and has, this week, won the Best Non-Feature Film Direction at the 70th National Film Awards.

A still from the documentary film 'From the Shadows'.

It was in Kolkata first that the filmmaker sighted the shadow of a girl on a wall, with the accompanying hashtags #MissingGirls and #every8minutes. That shadow followed her, with an eerie frequency, to the cities she went to, from Mumbai to Bangalore. The quest to know the artist behind the image led her to photographer and artist Leena Kejriwal, who’d grown up in a home that overlooked West Bengal’s Sonagachi, Asia’s biggest red-light district. Menacherry began following Kejriwal’s work in the areas and in Sundarbans where every other home has a story of a missing girl. When Samina (name changed), a protagonist in Menacherry’s latest film, managed to escape and asked Kejriwal to support her in a prosecution case, “I realised as a documentary filmmaker that this was the rare chance to capture a narrative of two women banding together to seek justice. The gruelling, twists, turns and delays made me start looking for other such stories,” says the filmmaker, who met Hasina Kharbhih, in the neighbouring state of Meghalaya, who had got the rare conviction for Ella Sangma despite 400 witnesses turning hostile and has been working to repatriate other survivors to their home countries in Bangladesh and Nepal.

In the end, the film’s protagonist Samina (name changed) “became the first shadow of the girl on the wall I saw and the audiences have told me how she represents every survivor because they do not see her face. So, we have to lean into her world and listen much closer. This is what it demands from the audience and this is the world of a survivor....we will need to reorient and listen harder to their stories if we are to find solutions,” says Menacherry about her “toughest film”.

In the early 2000s, when Miriam Chandy Menacherry moved to Mumbai from Bangalore, to assist director Manish Jha on the Tulip Joshi-starrer Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women (2003), the “eye-opening experience” on how to craft a socially relevant, independent film, backed by an international co-production fuelled her thrill. She was stunned to see stuntmen perform live-action scenes, braving fire and acrobatics with minimal safety nets. She realised that these “unsung heroes would not be recognised in the final film as they play body doubles to the stars”. Her first full-length documentary, Stuntmen of Bollywood (2005), was thus born. An instant hit on television, the film’s main character, a car-stunt specialist, Habib Haji, later rang her up when he was shooting for Dhoom 2 (2006), to narrate how a group of boys in South Africa recognised him from Menacherry’s documentary and sought his autograph. His father was a stuntman, too, who lived and died in oblivion.

For 18 years, Menacherry has stuck to the documentary format for its power to present ‘real narratives’. In this time, she’s made Robot Jockey, a race to replace the brutal practise of using children as jockeys in the camel races of the Middle East with robots; The Rat Race (2011), about the rat killers of Mumbai; the Indo-Pak co-production Lyari Notes (2015), a coming-of-age film about music and resistance in Karachi; and From the Shadows (2022), about child sex-trafficking survivors and their courageous bid for justice.

Menacherry, 49, is also a Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, graduate like some of the recent documentarians who have been bringing global glory to the Indian documentary and spearheading the ‘New Wave’ of non-fiction storytelling: Shaunak Sen (All that Breathes), Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh (Writing with Fire), Sarvnik Kaur (Against the Tide). Jamia’s AJK Mass Communication Research Center is the “rare film institute that focuses on documentary as a medium,” she says.

Menacherry adds, “Suddenly the documentary genre is getting a lot of attention globally as well as in India, as the ‘New Wave’ of storytellers. I consider myself belonging to a generation that began this ‘new wave’, along with Nishtha Jain, Farida Pacha, Sourav Sarangi, Ranu Ghosh and Supriyo Sen, among others, who’d premiere at the world’s biggest non-fiction festival, International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), or at Berlinale, opening the doors to navigate European financing and markets through co-productions, grants and distribution. Only recently has the North American festival and market opened up bringing in more resources and publicity to herald the emergence of the New Wave of documentary from India. I have a lot of respect for my documentary fraternity right from Anand Patwardhan and Deepa Dhanraj’s generation right up to the first-time filmmakers who bring fresh energy, ideas and commitment to their craft. It is definitely the road less taken, one with little support and riddled with hurdles, it is a vocation to be a creative entrepreneur.”

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A still from the documentary film 'From the Shadows'.

In this interview, Menacherry talks about the making of From the Shadows and more. Edited excerpts:

What were the ethical and cinematic dilemmas for you, during the making of the film?

It comes with taking up the challenge of a sensitive subject of representing the stories of survivors of child sex trafficking. We focused on characters who are now majors but we had to still keep in mind the strict laws now in place to obtain consent. Further, it was a subjudice criminal case. Four years into shooting my film, my survivor whom we renamed Samina told me that my film might be out before her court verdict so she requested me to hide her identity but she wanted the world to know her story. This was a huge dilemma as I felt her expressive face was the canvas of my film and it was being snatched away from me but we had to respect the much larger courageous battle she was fighting.

Did you feel like giving up at any point?

The film, which took six years to make, took a huge psychological toll on me because one internalises the world of a survivor and the constant fear of attacks. I would often wake up at nights in a cold sweat. What gave me the courage to go on was the survivors themselves who would show up for every court hearing despite the presence of the accused and their death threats. I felt, the least I could do was to also show up with our cameras as witnesses. From the Shadows #Missingirls has been my toughest film.

Was it an all-women crew?

The film was made with a predominantly women crew: the veteran editor Irene Dhar Malik, she was backed by Anuja Thakkar, screenplay writer Triparna Banerjee, co-producer Aliya Furniturewala, cinematographer Ranu Ghosh, production manager Sharon D’Mello and Parvathy Baul’s music. There was a spirit of sisterhood that is reflected on screen as well as behind the scenes that kept this film afloat even though there were, at least, four times when I was ready to give up.

Artist-activist Leena Kejriwal with a survivor in a still from the documentary film 'From the Shadows'.

Tell us about Leena Kejriwal and Hasina Kharbhih, the women and their ways of addressing girl-child trafficking?

It helped to bring on board the women who were fighting the survivor’s cases: Leena Kejriwal of Missing Link Trust and Hasina Kharbhih of Impulse NGO network. These two women opened the doors and yet defined the framework where we kept survivor consent central to our storytelling. Leena’s focus is on prevention, she uses art to combat trafficking and Samina’s (name changed) was the rare case she took up. She uses Samina’s case to create a digital comic to train the police force and also as part of her school programme for child safety. Hasina addresses trafficking through the 6Ps of her ‘Impulse model’ recognised by the UN: Partnerships, Protection, Prevention, Policing, Press and Prosecution. An icon in the Northeast region, which has porous international borders, and rampant trafficking, Hasina has worked on more than 70,000 cases.

What was approach to this film?

I began banking on the fleeting glimpses that are revealing rather than big bolt out of the blue sensationalism. My story is about trafficking seeped into our every day and the trafficker being an ordinary person, a neighbour, family member or a policeman and right up the power structure. I tell the story through the characters’ lived experiences, their journey as they battle for justice against great odds. I only went as far as they took me —  Sonagachi, Sundarbans, GB Road, Bangalore, Chennai, Siliguri, Shillong, Assam, Bangladesh and Nepal…this global multi-billion-dollar business has a strong grip on the Indian subcontinent which is both a source and destination for trafficking.

Was trafficking happening during COVID?

Trafficking, in fact, peaked and almost doubled during Covid. Even when the whole world was in lockdown with movement restrictions, humans were being bought, sold and moved by traffickers. There were news reports that the child helpline number was ringing incessantly. Trafficking is a global multi-billion-dollar business and traffickers have a vast network that profile and prey on distress.

According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the total number of girls reported kidnapped or abducted by 2022 increased to 1,02,318. These are only reported cases, most go unreported. These figures were even higher during the pandemic when teenagers, which is the most vulnerable age group, were in maximum distress and were easy prey for traffickers. The growing trend is online trafficking through social media and gaming spaces to lure their victims.

Hasina Kharbhih (left) with Ella Sangma in a still from the documentary film 'From the Shadows'.

Do you see documentary filmmakers doubling up as journalists?

I think the recent elections and exit polls revealed how news is not in touch with the main issues faced by the Indian polity and they are putting out reports and predictions with zero fieldwork. Instead, anchors shriek their opinions on the top of their voice. I think, it is documentaries that are providing depth and rigour to uncover the issues of our times through factual storytelling.

However, the language of documentary is very different from news. There is craftsmanship and definitely a lot of time spent in building trust with the people in one’s film so they lead the way and it ends up a nuanced narrative.

You are a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Breakthrough India 2024 Talent and also a 2024-25 Fulbright-Nehru Fellow. Could you tell us what these would entail?

I’m really thrilled to be part of the BAFTA Breakthrough cohort in partnership with Netflix for 2023-24. A pre-requisite is that it needs to be a breakthrough year. The year I got nominated, 2022, was, in fact, a breakthrough because two of my films that were stuck during the pandemic From the Shadows and The Leopard’s Tribe got completed and premiered.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow for Academic and Professional Excellence, I will be screening my films that focus on ‘the invisible narratives’ from the subcontinent. This helps to build the narratives rarely seen on mainstream media.

I will also be completing my research that I began through an India Foundation for the Arts grant to study the contribution of women in cinema and collectivism. I mainly focussed on Kerala but now I’m expanding the research to see the ripple effect in the rest of the country as well as parallel movements in Hollywood.

Where do you see women in the documentary film movement in India?

I’m very proud to say that women have played an important role in building the documentary movement in India. The basic quality required to be a good documentary filmmaker is empathy and I think women have honed this quality to be wonderful storytellers about real and rooted subjects. The challenge is that the Indian documentary filmmaker wears multiple hats: director, producer and often the distributer. It’s a very complex juggling act with more chances of failure than success.

Tell us about your association with Bitchitra Collective, a women and non-binary documentary filmmakers’ collective based in India and the US.

Bitchitra is a very vibrant collective with a spirit of collaboration rather than competition. It was a very lonely and individualistic journey and now the collective spirit is so very refreshing to be able to share resources, knowledge and cheer each other on. We support one another through an annual grant for emerging filmmakers, sharing news of each other’s screenings, job openings and mentorship.

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What’s next?

I’m co-producing three films: Fair-Home Fairy-Tales by veteran filmmaker Sourav Sarangi about the fascinating life of a puppeteer and her memory of war and displacement, Umbrellas of the Acrobats by a first-time filmmaker Mukesh Subramanium, that is a poignant coming-of-age story about a misfit in a travelling circus, and Before the Feast by environmental filmmaker Rajani Mani about a family of farmers in Kerala and their rice crop.

Besides these, I’ll be completing my manuscript of Women in Cinema and create mixed media pieces that I hope to exhibit in the public domain.