Why Oscars open a big door for Indian documentaries

Naatu Naatu and The Elephant Whisperers – the two Oscar wins for India this year, represent two ends of the Indian filmmaking spectrum. One is a popular dance number from a blockbuster South Indian movie. The other is a serious documentary on an indigenous couple and an orphaned elephant. For a long time, the world viewed the Indian cinema industry as primarily Bollywood or films made in Hindi. Naatu Naatu is a song from RRR, a film made in the Telugu language. According to an estimate by the consultancy Ormax Media, Telugu cinema industry earned $212 million last year compared to the Hindi film industry’s $197 million. This trend, where films made in south Indian languages are finding popularity has been increasing in the last few years. India and the rest of the world are now taking notice of south Indian cinema. In global gaze While popular Indian cinema is getting more popular, what is more interesting this year is that two Indian documentaries were nominated to the Oscars. All That Breathes by director Shaunak Sen was nominated in the Documentary Feature Film category while The Elephant Whisperers by Kartiki Gonsalves was nominated in the Documentary Short Film category. All That Breathes has already won the World Documentary Grand Jury prize at the Sundance and Golden Eye at Cannes. The film however, lost the Oscar to Daniel Roher’s Navalny. But the Kartiki Gonsalves documentary bagged the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film. Shaunak and Kartiki are both young filmmakers, going to the Oscars with their second and debut films respectively. And the fact that they chose the genre of documentary in these times is interesting. Unlike other cinemas in India, people don’t go to the cinema hall to watch documentaries. Traditionally these documentaries depended on funding by Doordarshan, Films Division, PSBT and the information departments of various states. In the last decade, funding from these sources has diminished. Documentary filmmaking needs painstaking research and long months of filming. They are also meant for a more discerning audience. Instead of being pontifical, documentaries try to distance themselves from the subject – presenting it in a way that lets the audience make up their own mind. In the last decade, there has been an explosion in 24x7 news channels and social media. This has meant an explosion in visual ‘content’. Much of this is pre-digested, simplified and opinionated. The expansion in the social base of news channels, social media and mobile networks does not at all translate into an expanded user base for documentaries. Since documentaries compete for the same piece of pie as social media shorts or news projects, it looked like documentary as a genre was facing an uphill task in India. But the fact that All That Breathes was supported by HBO and The Elephant Whisperers by Netflix has shown that while one door closed for documentaries, another huge one has opened. OTTs have given documentaries from every corner of the world, a path to reach niche audiences across the world. Like art films in India, documentaries are bolstered by global appreciation before their India release. Raam Reddy’s Kannada film Thithi for instance, rode to box office success in Karnataka because of the curiosity it had generated in film festivals across the world. Similarly the films by Shaunak and Kartiki caught the attention of the world first and then got audiences at home curious. All art is a creative response to its present day. Some artists let the present inspire them and flow out as fiction. Others directly react to what they observe. And that becomes journalism or sometimes non-fiction. On screen, cinema is fiction and documentary is non-fiction. In cinema writers create an imaginary world. A documentary maker edits the real world to form a narrative.A special film language On the surface All That Breathes is about two brothers from a minority community trying to save majestic black kites falling from the polluted Delhi skies. But distantly in the soundtrack is also another kind of pollution – social and political – that the city is witness to. Similarly The Elephant Whisperers unfolds almost like a children’s tale. We see a forest, a couple, an orphaned young elephant and their lives. When another baby elephant enters the household, the earlier one throws a jealous tantrum. Out of 450 hours of footage shot over 5 years, The Elephant Whisperers chooses the language of beauty instead of trauma. The Tamil tribal couple speak a dialect even Tamil speakers will find difficult to understand without subtitles. That is how authentic the documentary is. Showing us an incident in a remote tribe, the film mirrors the story of modern civilisation itself. No preaching, no rhetoric, the film is a gentle lesson in restraint and distance. The film whispers, and doesn’t shout. I don’t know if a rejuvenation in documentary filmmaking is taking place in other countries too. But in this age of ‘content’ creators churning out new videos per day, per week, Shaunak and Kartiki’s full-hearted research and hard work really should inspire India’s younger filmmakers. May their tribe increase. The writer award-winning feature film and documentary director