Oscar nominations and a dizzying win at the academy awards failed to move the needle on the future of the feature-length documentary film
On the morning of March 13, 2023, people in India woke up early to watch the Academy Awards with a little more than routine fandom. There was nerviness, unreal anticipation and just a whisker of hopefulness. Three Indian films, for the first time in our history, were in contention. Two of them were documentaries. One of them actually, unexpectedly, won. Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga’s The Elephant Whisperers (Netflix) took home one of India’s two trophies that night (the other being RRR’s win for Naatu Naatu).
In India, it was still early morning, which seemed like the dawn of a highly precipitous year for the Indian documentary; a format that has recently offered stellar work, moving stories, and obvious international recognition. But one which continues to wrestle dogma, existentialism and censorship. 2023’s veritable victories only established the binary of the Indian documentary’s thwarted potential. Stars abroad, duds back home.
No OTT takers for documentaries
Documentary filmmaking continues to be this fledgling practice of documenting without denouement. “This year, after having tried and been rejected by every platform and avenue we pitched to, I decided to put the film on YouTube. It’s accrued excellent views, but whatever the numbers, at least it will remain my baby,” Samarth Mahajan, director of the award-winning Borderlands, says.
After spending months trying to find his film a home, Mahajan was left with no choice but to upload his film on YouTube where it remains free for everyone to see. Funding and interest remain two highly binary terms in the context of the documentary film. “Nobody here is actually interested in the documentary feature-length film. Some platforms reject the format outright. Some consider only films with a certain length,” the filmmaker says.
Culturally, Indian audiences simply haven’t been trained to the pleasures of good non-fiction storytelling. Thanks to the nadir that television news is at, the purity of bearing witness itself has been eroded to the point that people would rather have the ditzy lie than the copiously dull truth. Over and above the length, the subject of the documentary, Mahajan says, is also scrutinised through the lens of jeopardy and algorithmic fitment.
Reaching the audience: Such a long journey
The Elephant Whisperers, for all its achievements, is an outlier. Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes released in India only because it found a home first on HBO (the American studio which recently shifted platforms from Disney+Hotstar to JioCinema). Given the political subtext and acumen of All That Breathes, its presence on JioCinema has hardly been acknowledged, let alone marketed. “It’s a paradox really. Most platforms commissioning films at the moment want only a couple of categories between either true crime or something to do with celebrities. Stories about common people, except in a one-off scenario, simply aren’t in demand,” Mahajan attests.
Of the handful of homemade documentaries that are across Netflix and Prime Video this year — the only two platforms interested in the format — almost all of them have been docu-series dealing either with true crime or cinematic prestige. Prime Video’s Rainbow Rishta, which explores queer lives and relationships, you could argue, is as an admission of celebrity as much as it is the urban untangling of complex dating sub-cultures. It’s interesting but also politically safe.
For a young documentary filmmaker, Mahajan says, looking to make his own film, there are a handful of incubators and institutions that will support and fund initial stages of the project. The journey from there to reaching an actual audience, however, remains full of bureaucratic potholes and creative bumps. Plenty of world-conquering documentaries have made it to festivals, foreign broadcasting slates, but haven’t seen the light of day back in the land they were born in.
The othering of our stories
The Oscar-nominated Writing With Fire, for example, has found homes in more than 30 countries, except in the country of its origin. Even two years after its premiere, it continues to evade release. Vinay Shukla’s While We Watched, a biopic-like survey of journalist Ravish Kumar’s life, has been watched by a few at private screenings. And though it has travelled the world, its political bent will ensure its chances of a native release are next to none. The streaming utopia of lore, thus, has failed to materialise as a free space for experimentation and exploration. The argument that the audience might not exist has, quite simply, not been put to the test.
“This isn’t necessarily an audience problem but more of a gatekeeper problem. I just think there are enough roadblocks and unnerving barriers to entry,” Mahajan says. To get some word-of-mouth going about his film, Mahajan also used what he calls ‘a bottom-up’ approach in which he urged help from film influencers and independent cinema handles on social media, to build hype around the film’s release on YouTube.
Ironically, for the first time in the format’s history, there is actually money to be made. International rights automatically translate to a decent pay-out. An American licensing deal alone, the director says, can fetch you upwards of 30,000 dollars. Multiply that by different geographies and deals and you’re looking at a decent payday for something considered widely irrelevant by the industry.
That pay-out, paradoxically, hasn’t translated to a fertile space for non-fiction ideas, or the kind of stories we know nothing of unless they are welcomed by a foreign host. The lack of intent precedes the othering of our own stories. It’s a bit of a quandary, one which seems to be solving itself, quite simply, by approaching a different set of ears and eyes. “I’m hopeful for the format. It’s still better than what it used to be, but if you ask me if the Oscar victories and visibility has changed anything for the future of the Indian documentary, then I’ll have to say, it absolutely hasn’t,” Mahajan says.
