In Suketu Mehta's breakout book, Maximum City published in 2004, the Mumbai-born author, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, spends several pages raving about Bollywood, with one particular conversation with a film director standing out.
The director is Vidhu Vinod Chopra, the only filmmaker in Bollywood today to have won an Oscar nomination. That was in 1979 when Chopra, 26 years old and fresh out of Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, got the nod in the Best Documentary Short category at the 51st Academy Awards for An Encounter with Faces, about a group of children in an orphanage.
It was one of the earliest Oscar nominations for an Indian in any category. Before Chopra, the 12th Fail (2023), Munna Bhai MBBS (2003) and 3 Idiots (2009) director, India had three Oscar nominations, two of them in the documentary or short category.
Produced by the Films Division under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting before it merged with National Film Development Corporation last year, Chopra-directed An Encounter with Faces lost to an American film, The Flight of the Gossamer Condor, the story of the first human-powered aircraft.
Nearly two decades before Chopra's nomination, another young Mumbai-born filmmaker won a nomination in the Academy Awards short category — Ismail Merchant for his debut film, The Creation of Women in 1961.
The documentary short nomination for An Encounter with Faces was preceded by the nomination for yet another Mumbai-born filmmaker, Fali Billimoria's The House That Ananda Built, also produced by Films Division, in the documentary short category in 1969. Both Merchant and Billimoria, known for his famously filmed interview with Jawaharlal Nehru in 1958 to disprove American allegations of the then Indian prime minister being a Communist, are no more.
More documentaries from and on India have earned Academy nominations than Indian feature films (including Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, 1957, Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!, 1988, and Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan, 2001; Pan Nalin’s The Last Film Show/Chhello Show, 2023 was shortlisted).
Decades later, another remarkable run for the ‘India story’ at the Academy Awards’ documentary category in recent years has returned the global focus on Indian documentary filmmaking. At the Oscars last year, two Indian films were vying for the honours in the two documentary categories of the Oscars with one going on to win, a first for an Indian filmmaker.
Delhi-based Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes was a nominee in the Best Documentary Feature category and Ooty-based Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers in the Best Documentary Short category.
Gonsalves went on to win while Sen lost to a fellow former student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, Shane Boris, who was one of the producers of Navalny, which won the Best Documentary Feature award last year.
This year, a film shot in India and directed by an Indian-Canadian filmmaker will vie for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. To Kill a Tiger by Toronto-based Nisha Pahuja is one of the five nominees in the category.
The Delhi-born Pahuja, known for her previous documentary, The World Before Her (2012) about two young Indian women pursuing different ambitions, shot her new documentary in Jharkhand, a nearly decade-long project about the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl.
Director of the short film, Indian Bus Outrage, in 2014 on the 2012 gang rape of a student in Delhi, Pahuja's To Kill a Tiger is the lone India-related nominee this year at the Academy Awards to be presented on March 11.
An Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, the Toronto-based Pahuja's new film is the first documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada to win an Oscar nomination in the last four decades. Another Indian-born filmmaker to have won an Oscar nomination for a film produced by National Film Board of Canada was Ishu Patel for The Bead Game in the Best Animation Short Film category in 1978.
After the nominations of Merchant, Billimoria and Chopra, an Indian film returned to the list of Oscar nominees for documentary or short in 2005 when Little Terrorist by Ashwin Kumar (Road to Ladakh and Inshallah, Kashmir) received the nomination in the Best Live Action Short category.
In recent years, Indian documentaries have been increasingly receiving the attention of Oscar voters. In 2022, Writing With Fire by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh on the story of Khabar Lahariya, the Dalit women reporters-led newspaper in Uttar Pradesh, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature, which they lost to Summer of Soul, the story of the music festival in Harlem in 1969 called the 'Black Woodstock'.
Two years earlier, two South Asian-origin filmmakers — the US-based Smriti Mundhra and Canada-based Sami Khan — were nominated in the Best Documentary Short category for St. Louis Superman on the story of Black activist and politician Bruce Franks Jr. It was picked up by MTV Documentary Films chief Sheila Nevins, who won another nomination for a short documentary, The ABCs of Book Banning, at the Oscars this year.
Two short documentaries shot in India — Smile Pinki by American director Megan Mylan and Iranian-American filmmaker Rayka Zehtabch's Period: End of Sentence — have won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short in the past. Smile Pinki, about corrective surgery helping children born with cleft lips in India, won the Oscar in 2009 and Period: End of Sentence, on the taboo surrounding menstruation in rural India, won in 2019.
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