Rise of the Indian documentary: Journey to the Oscar-nominated 'Writing With Fire'

'The Blind Rabbit' by Pallavi Paul, which was part of the short and mid-length programme of the Rotterdam festival last year, stood out for its use of found footage.

Early last year, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh were among a handful of Indian filmmakers who made it to the film festival circuit hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing With Fire, the documentary by Thomas and Ghosh, went on to win two top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival in the US. The film has now capped its early success and more prizes on the tour with an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature, the first time an Indian full-length film in this format has been nominated for the prize.

The achievement of Thomas and Ghosh is built on a remarkable run of Indian documentary films on the international festival circuit in the last five-seven years. Documentary veterans and a new generation of young directors - mixing their passion for filmmaking with a hunger for storytelling, aided by style and aesthetics - have devised a new language for the Indian documentary. The new set of filmmakers are skillfully sieving through social layers in the country's urban spaces and hinterland to reveal the good and the bad, thus forcing change.

The tone was set by three pathbreaking documentaries made in 2016. The Cinema Travellers by Shirley Thomas and Amit Madheshiya, An Insignificant Man by Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla and Machines by Rahul Jain changed the rules of the game for the Indian documentary feature. There was suddenly an incisiveness in style and content. And behind the new-found aesthetics was courage and the desire to seek the truth.

The Cinema Travellers, the story of the disappearing travelling cinema tradition in rural India, won praise from the international audience at the Cannes Film Festival where it premiered in 2016. Mentored at the edit and story lab of the Sundance festival, it won a Special Mention at the Golden Eye Awards for documentary film in Cannes.

Also in 2016, An Insignificant Man premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), quickly winning admiration for the sharp focus of its young filmmakers Ranka and Shukla in trailing Arvind Kejriwal and his band of anti-corruption activists to discover the change of course of history of Indian politics. Ranka, who wrote to director Anand Gandhi for a job after his talk at the St Xavier's College, Mumbai, where she was a student, and Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) alumnus Shukla followed Kejriwal with their camera for months, capturing the moments when he turned from an insignificant protester to a reluctant leader.

The perseverance of the directors of The Cinema Travellers and An Insignificant Man in tracing tradition and making of history provided a new meaning to documentary-making in the country. For Abraham and Madheshiya, alumni of Jamia Millia Islamia's Mass Communication and Research Centre, it took five years to make The Cinema Travellers. The still photography that the filmmakers were heavily dependent on for the documentary added an extra dimension to the story. Ranka and Shukla were on the move for months in the heat and dust of Delhi. Both films won several awards at international festivals.

Two years later, Anant Patwardhan, considered the Father of Indian Documentary Filmmaking, took his new work to the Toronto festival. Vivek (Reason), stunned the audience at TIFF 2018 transfixed to the powerful footage of India's social and religious churning spanning 4 hours and 20 minutes. The film, which won the top prize at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in the Netherlands, was talked about in the same breath as the new film of Michael Moore about Donald Trump (Fahrenheit 11/9), also part of the documentary programme of the Toronto festival in the same year. After the film's premiere in Toronto, Patwardhan took his work to American universities, following it up with numerous visits to campuses and art festivals back home.

The successful journey of the Indian documentary continued in 2021, with four Indian films from the format turning heads on the international stage. Writing With Fire, The Blind Rabbit by Pallavi Paul, Invisible Demons by Rahul Jain and A Night of Knowing Nothing by Payal Kapadia set the festival circuit on fire with their vision and technique.

Paul, who combined her academic practice at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, with art practice in The Blind Rabbit, drew instant accolades for a work that gathered both documentary and fiction styles. Part of the short and mid-length programme of the Rotterdam festival last year, The Blind Rabbit examined police violence, complicity and corruption by analysing some of the most vicious events from the Emergency, 1984 riots, 2019 Jamia Millia Islamia library attack, and 2020 Delhi riots. By working on the shards of time and space that amplify the brutality behind the establishment's narrative, the film stood out for its use of found footage (material made available on social media).

"A lot of material was getting generated (on social media) by the ongoing violence. All I had to do was wait for them to find a way to speak to each other," says Paul, for whom editing provided a sharp way to enter these images.

Film and Television Institute of India alumna Payal Kapadia.

Delhi-born Jain, who burst onto the documentary scene with Machines (2016), about the stifling conditions endured by workers in a textile factory, returned last year with Invisible Demons, a gritty documentary on air pollution in Delhi.

Wanting to make a movie about the toxic air of Delhi that went beyond the headlines, Jain, who chose visual semiotics for a master's degree in aesthetics and politics at the California Institute of the Arts, focused on the current geological age marked by the negative influence of human activity on the planet.

“I wanted to explore how artists in the last 100 years of filmmaking have been able to communicate our species’ relationship to the natural world, because the most drastic changes came about in the 20th century, which was also the century of cinema,” explains Jain.

The only Indian entry at the Cannes festival last year, Invisible Demons broke ground by turning the camera on the poorest sections of society which are the worst victims of pollution.

A Night of Knowing Nothing, which participated in the Directors' Fortnight parallel programme in Cannes also last year, took home the Golden Eye Award for Best Documentary, beating stiff competition from filmmakers like Oliver Stone (JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass), Andrea Arnold (Cow), Todd Haynes (The Velvet Underground) and Marco Bellocchio (Marx Can Wait).

FTII alumna Kapadia picked up another prize in Toronto for her film, which fuses fiction and non-fiction in the backdrop of student protests, winning the festival's Amplify Voices Award for the best film by an under-represented filmmaker.

If Thomas and Ghosh win the Oscar on March 27 for Writing With Fire, it will have come on the foundation of a string of strong showings by Indian documentaries in the past decade.

Rahul Jain's 'Invisible Demons' is about air pollution in the national capital.