Canadian of Indian origin Nisha Pahuja’s documentary To Kill a Tiger makes it to the Oscars 2024 shortlist of 15 Best Documentary Feature. This year in March, after Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, her producer Guneet Monga said in her acceptance speech: “Tonight is historic! This is the first Oscar for any Indian production, and two women here won this…the future is audacious, the future is us and the future is here.” Rintu Thomas, with Sushmit Ghosh, wrote history when their Writing with Fire became the first ever Indian documentary feature to make it to the final five in 2022. New York-based veteran Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair, who began her journey with gritty, realistic documentaries, boarded, as executive producer, Sarvnik Kaur’s sophomore documentary feature Against The Tide which picked up special Jury prize in Vérité Filmmaking at Sundance Film Festival this year.
For the Indian documentary, born before the feature film, with HS Bhatavdekar’s The Wrestlers (1899), the journey has been long. In free India, newsreels and documentary films were used for nation-building, shown in theatres, made with State-support (Films Division, 1948). The ’70s Emergency years catapulted the independent documentary movement and guerrilla filmmaking. It birthed India’s first feminist film collective Yugantar.
The going has got tough for the non-fiction filmmaker. On the one hand, OTT platforms are co-opting the documentary format to churn out true crime or be PR exercises for pop-cults, as globally, the more featurised, polished, post-produced documentary films — which questions the ethos of the journalistic format — are grabbing eyeballs on the other hand. The traditional documentary filmmaker in a tier-II city in India sits and reflects on their future.
“Oscars tends to make news. But where will a small-time documentary filmmaker secure $60,000-80,000 (for theatrical run, marketing, publicity) from to run a competitive Academy Award campaign against a streamer-backed film? The OTT people were never filmmakers to begin with. OTT/streaming platforms built their success using indie films, including independently made documentary films. Today, that’s not the case. These days, content is being produced in-house while acquisitions are nearly non-existent. As a result, the indie documentary filmmakers get left out,” says the US-based Vaishali Sinha, whose film Ask the Sexpert (2017), selected/licensed twice by Netflix is of a certain production quality. “If you care about having a healthy society, you should be investing in documentary filmmakers,” she adds.
Mumbai-based Meenakshi Shedde, that fairy godmother for South Asian cinema on the global stage, who works in South Asia programming for the Berlin, Toronto and Jio Mami Mumbai film festivals, and was on the Jury of the Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine de la Critique/ Critics’ Week in 2023 and Golden Globes International Voter 2022-23 (recall RRR’s Naatu Naatu win?), says, “The challenge for the documentary filmmakers is on an altogether different level. In a landscape like India, where even an indie fiction film with B-level stars find it difficult to get funding, imagine the fate of documentaries with no stars.”
Women, arise
Two years ago, when the deadly Delta variant of COVID-19 had nearly put her country of origin on ventilators, in a knee-jerk reaction, Sinha posted on the US-based Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM) group as its member, “Can we do something about our sisters in India?” She made a request to raise sustenance funds for small-time independent filmmakers in her home country. “Fundraising was happening in the international community. The Indian-Americans, who were stuck and couldn’t come home, were sending money for oxygen cylinders, etc.,” says Sinha. Her message resulted in a ripple effect. “Around 150-200 Indian community of diaspora filmmakers dove in immediately.” A small group was formed; Zoom e-meets were organised. India-based veteran documentary filmmaker Nishtha Jain gave the newfound collective of women and non-binary documentary filmmakers of Indian origin, based in India and the US, its name — Bitchitra, which derives from a conjunction of the words vrittachitra (Hindi for documentary, or picture of reality) and bichitra (diverse, many-coloured, motley). The core committee, around 5-6 members, of this strong cohort of 350-plus womxn works daily and largely works pro bono.
“Bitchitra is a discovery process. Our mission is to make women and nonbinary bonds and ties sustainable. To really hang on to each other, find new ways to raise support and work in an organised way. The aim is to gradually fundraise in India,” says Sinha, founding member of Bitchitra Collective.
“Once you get into it, making documentary cinema becomes addictive. It engages with people on the field, to tell and archive their stories. Socially and politically, documentary is an important form to work with. The biggest challenge remains funding. Its other issue has been the lack of public screening spaces and possibilities in India,” says Bangalore-based Bitchitra member and documentary filmmaker Sunanda Bhat, part of Vikalp Bengaluru, which screens non-fiction films in the city, like Vikalp@Prithvi in Mumbai.
“Bitchitra started off as a response to the pandemic, but now we have several programmes and initiatives. The idea is to bring together filmmakers, support system, mentors, fundraising,” adds Bhat, “There is such a dearth of support for filmmakers here. I don’t think there exists a forum like this in India.”
A creative rising tide
Filmmaker Prerana Thakurdesai, a former journalist and part of the core team that produced the Aamir Khan-hosted talk show Satyamev Jayate (2012-14), moved to the US in 2012. In 2017-18, she was introduced to BGDM, “the ecosystem comprises a range: journalists, programmers, distributors, filmmakers, students who’ve made thesis films, the idea is to get all of these people together, Bitchitra is like that, too,” she says, “Like BGDM, we are here to create a bargaining power for ourselves, not be competitive but rather add to the momentum. To share grant information, mentor and assist each other. It is a creative rising tide. If we all don’t rise, none of us rises.”
Bitchitra Collective started in 2021 as a Facebook group. By December that year, they witnessed a lot of interest and came up with an action plan on presenting proposals. “The first month of Bitchitra was born out of personal need. We set up a fundraiser on GoFundMe.com to support our documentary compatriots in India. People brought in whatever little money they could, even $2. We raised these funds under the banner of the Bitchitra Collective. A little less than a year later we got a two-year grant from Color Congress (a fiscally sponsored project of Common Counsel Foundation, the US), which will expire middle of next year, so we are starting on our second round of fundraising now,” says Thakurdesai.
Two rounds of fellowship, giving small grants to needy filmmakers, but what is “more important is the year-long mentorship, where you can choose your mentor. For emerging filmmakers, proposal writing, and grant writing are a huge challenge,” Bhat adds.
Narrowing the focus
“Are we South Asian or of Indian-origin? Limiting ourselves to the latter was a big achievement to directing our focus, because there already exists the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc),” says Sinha, “We found a fiscal sponsor in America in 2021. S Leo Chiang’s [501(c)(3)] non-profit Walking Iris Media (supports initiatives and programmes, such as ours and A-Doc, which promote the visibility of documentary filmmakers of colour and address the challenges around access and sustainability faced by them). A fiscal sponsor is a non-profit organisation that takes the money and disburses them to you as and when you need it. There are protocols, of course. We already do this as indie producers, so we applied it to the collective.”
Bitchitra Collective is a US- and India-based entity, not an NGO or non-profit. “We are an informal collective funded by a non-profit. Our funding is disbursed through a fiscal sponsor, which, I believe, is something that needs exploring in India,” adds Thakurdesai, “Eventually, the idea is that money needs to come from everywhere. To have chapters around the world. Our next move would be to find fundraising partnerships in the US and elsewhere.”
There are different kinds of funding initiatives in the US that support documentary filmmakers who are mothers, or are marginalised, etc., but no one fund/body which takes care of everything. The collective’s raison d’etre is what Thakurdesai calls “adaan-pradaan, a give and take to each other, so that we are not reinventing the wheel constantly but seeking tie-ups with similar organisations, along with coming up with new ideas that support the community.”
Each one, raise one
“The collective first raised a sustenance fund of $10,000, of which $500 was given to per person (20 grantees), the aim was to provide a small reprieve to those filmmakers out of jobs, etc., even if it alleviates one-two months of bill payments,” says Sinha.
And “who were the beneficiaries of this artists’ support/sustenance fund?” Shedde says, “People from Dalit Camera, which documents life from the perspective of Dalit, Adivasi, Bahujan and other minorities in India, and a queer filmmaker, among others. People were dying of coronavirus. Survival needs money. The genesis of the collective was to raise funds to support filmmakers in India during COVID-19, to help them pay regular bills, medical, food, etc., not for making films. I’m not aware of any other organisation doing that, and I have worked on funding bodies globally (Sundance Institute Documentary Fund Program, Hubert Bals Fund-Rotterdam, Venice Film Festival’s Biennale College Cinema),” says Shedde, adding, “People in India don’t value the arts much. How many feature films/documentaries did the Indian government produce, distribute, exhibit in the last decade? What did those films achieve?” she asks.
Shedde is beyond impressed with the group she’s a part of. “I’ve not found this kind of extreme sensitivity and determination that the collective should go forward before any individual, in a very competitive field. That kind of unselfishness is very rare and exceptional in the film world,” she says, adding “Nobody thinks of artistes as normal people who have bills to pay. This sustenance grant comes from filmmakers understanding from their own life experiences. They can use the fund raised to make their next film but are putting it in for 20 others, these filmmakers are not competitors. They are nurturers. The mentoring is very precious. Handholding is part of the commitment. It’s a movement. These are active filmmakers, not old and retired, with ample time on their hands, to pass on the baton, but they are doing this on the side while going on their own shoots and raising families. The sensitive inclusion, pushing of diversity in a genuine way, putting others before the self is all coming from a place of generosity,” says Shedde, “Fundraising is one aspect, but it is the year-long mentoring in script development, post-production and more, which is very precious…It’s good to have a group that addresses general queries, too: ‘hey I’m shooting in Ladakh, connect me to a cinematographer there? Or I’m getting American crew to India, what’s the procedure?”
Next, Sinha, Mridu Chandra, Lina Srivastava, Juhi Sharma, Farha Khatun and Prerana Thakurdesai co-wrote the application for a Color Congress grant. Sinha says, “The peer network-driven movement by documentary filmmakers and producers of colour gave an open call for organisational funding. The Black Lives Matter movement happened simultaneously. Many funding and leadership opportunities (Perspective Fund, Ford Foundation) came up in the US. We came up with 20 filmmakers as grantees through internal nomination. The idea was to find a few people who were in dire need. Had the grant (two-year unrestricted grant of $90,000) not come through, we would have carried on any way, but the grant gave us wings, emboldened us to think big. Suddenly, we had annual budgets and programmes.”
With that grant, Bitchitra announced its first Documentary Film and Media Fellowship, and gave a one-time fund to the projects of seven underrepresented filmmakers in the two countries, and paired them with mentors, some of whom are Oscar-winning and BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated. Fundraising is one aspect, it is the mentoring which everyone associated with the collective calls “very precious”. Guiding in script development, post-production, there are grant writing workshops for young members: “the amount of words required, why they deserve the fund, what’s the unique hook about them, what demography of audience are you trying to reach, what impact will that have, etc.,” says Sinha.
The seven grantees from the first fellowship, in 2023, included Kolkata-based Debalina Majumder. Debalina, 51, consistently making films on the queer subject for two decades, was recently in the news when a screening of their documentary Gay India Matrimony (2019) was cancelled by Ravenshaw Film Festival, Cuttack, following the Supreme Court hearing on same-sex marriage. The Bitchitra fellowship grant gave “a much-needed boost” to their self-funded project Citizen Nagar — a story of dispossession, of people written out of our memories, maps, cities, of struggle and resilience — after “we had to return the initial grant from Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT, a Delhi-based not-for-profit, used to grant Central government-provided funds to independent documentary projects). The Bitchitra grant has been utilised for editing and partly shooting,” says Debalina, who benefitted a huge deal from the mentoring by Emmy Award-winning Los Angeles-based producer Apoorva Bakshi (Delhi Crime, The Hunt for Veerappan, etc.). “Apoorva’s approach, as an insider in international and commercial documentary scenario, has given us considerable technical and formal insights about production and dissemination. We are in the process of re-editing the film. Apoorva will also be crucial in circulating our film after completion,” adds Debalina.
Also starring
Among its other programmes, Bitchitra partnered with Good Docs, the North American educational distributor, to distribute six films, including India’s National Film Award winners Ek Tha Gaon/Once Upon A Village (directed by Srishti Lakhera, edited by Bhamati Sivapalan) and Farha Khatun’s Holy Rights in schools and universities. The revenue generated from their film’s distribution will go straight to the individual filmmakers, not to the Collective. “It is a huge thing for these filmmakers, who wouldn’t have been able to do this on their own,” says Bhat, as Thakurdesai adds, “One thing we do non-stop is scout around for partnerships. We can’t be in silos even within the collective.”
Then, the non-profit Film Independent’s six-week residency Global Media Makers, connecting international filmmakers with leading US entertainment professionals, will invite mid-career filmmakers for the 2024 LA residency, for which the Bitchitra Collective was asked to nominate five filmmakers.
On their YouTube channel, Bitchitra also presents a series of Zoom conversations called Let’s Talk, bringing together two filmmakers, whose works share a thematic connection, to talk on a chosen topic — on the art of making personal documentaries, impact screenings, creating content for children, etc.
Call me by your name
This year, Bitchitra lost a key member. The US-based filmmaker Sriyanka Ray died on a hiking trip. The collective has announced a fund in her name, in partnership with BGDM, of $4,000, to be given to a Bitchitra filmmaker whose work and values invoke the qualities Ray embodied — stories of marginalised people, from Sundarbans, India to the impact of gun violence on the mothers and children of Brooklyn, New York, the US. The Sriyanka Ray Fund is an additional grant alongside the 2024 Documentary and Media Fellowship (grant of $2,000 and mentorship), made possible with Color Congress grant, to be given to six filmmakers in 2024. The deadline for submission for both the grants is just a few days away, December 30.
Butterfly effect
The beginnings of Bitchitra coincided with the closure of four government/public film bodies in India, including Film Division, and transferring their mandates to NFDC, a loss-making public service undertaking. The final nail in the coffin came on December 31 last year.
“The closure was a huge shock for all of us, as there are very few options for indie filmmakers to get funds from within the country. My first documentary film was funded by Films Division. PSBT (Public Service Broadcasting Trust), too, has stopped functioning in its earlier form. The chances of getting funds from NGOs for documentaries is also not hopeful,” says a documentary filmmaker and a former FD employee. Filmmakers, to quote Nishtha Jain, have to go with their “begging bowls” to international funders. The level of competition there is cut-throat and their set of conditions can, at times, potentially alter your story and the way you want to tell it.
Little drops make a mighty ocean
For two decades, Delhi-based feminists Tulika Srivastava and Ridhima Mehra had been the two wheels running the show at PSBT, commissioning, in partnership with Prasar Bharati, close to 700 documentary films, which were telecast on Doordarshan weekly. Indie filmmaker Priya Thuvassery, also a Bitchitra member, has been making documentaries with PSBT’s support, including her latest, Coral Woman (2019). Srivastava and Mehra quit PSBT in 2021 to start Rough Edges, around the same time Bitchitra was coming together. Like Bitchitra, Rough Edges, too, seeks to enable, mentor, produce and disseminate documentary films that explore diverse, intersecting and complex realities, boldly informed by queer feminist politics and a commitment to social justice. “We launched our first set of fellowships through an open call in 2022, the Uncode Fellowships, under which we are supporting 10 short films by women, queer and gender-fluid artists,” says Mehra. Both Mehra and Srivastava are members on Bitchitra’s Facebook group. Such alliances will be crucial going forward, so that, as Thakurdesai says, one is not constantly “reinventing the wheel”, this is not “competition, but adding to the momentum”.
Shedde also mentions cinematographer-filmmaker Maheen Mirza’s Bhopal-based Ektara Collective, which has a unique model of filmmaking — socialist filmmaking, if you may. “They make films collectively. There’s no single filmmaker,” Shedde says. The 13-year-old collective is a diverse group of independent filmmakers and amateurs, that cuts across socio-economic and gender intersectionality.
ALSO READ: A joyland of their own: Ektara Collective’s ‘Ek Jagah Apni’
A room of one’s own
Shedde further mentions that the Kerala government has been allocating Rs 3 crore for women filmmakers since 2019. This followed the efforts of the Women in Cinema Collective, which was formed following actor-producer Dileep’s 2017 sexual assault case that rocked the Malayalam film industry, and which demanded safe work spaces for women. “Bitchitra’s two wheels are integrity and generosity; it is committed to a larger cause,” adds Shedde, “It is life-affirming for me, especially when you see how Indian society treats women in real life and virtually, notably on Twitter (now X), where they are routinely trolled/shut down with abuse, rape threats and worse.”
“The very idea of Bitchitra Collective is inspiring to me. Women-identifying filmmakers of different ages and locations have come together in this erstwhile male-dominated field,” says Debalina.
As a selection jury of a number of film festivals, Shedde treads a fine line. She admits that neither will she push for a film because it is by a fellow Bitchitra member nor will she hold herself back if the said film is genuinely good and deserves to be seen. In the end, only “the merit of a film” matters.
For more details about the collective and fellowship grant, visit bitchitracollective.org or write to info@bitchitracollective.org
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