IDSFFK: When documentary filmmakers look inward

For a long time, documentary filmmaking meant zooming the camera in on the issues of the day or the known and unknown struggles of the others. In recent years, there has been a trend of filmmakers turning inwards, to tell not just deeply personal stories, but also look at how the external political or social climate impacts their everyday lives.

For a long time, documentary filmmaking meant zooming the camera in on the issues of the day or the known and unknown struggles of the others. In recent years, there has been a trend of filmmakers turning inwards, to tell not just deeply personal stories, but also look at how the external political or social climate impacts their everyday lives. A set of documentaries and short films at the 15th International Documentary and Short Film Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) take the viewers along such inward journeys, which evoke sentiments that many could identify with, despite their personal nature.

Arbab Ahmad’s Insides and Outsides is concerned with the question of what it is like being a Muslim in contemporary India, marked by an increasingly hostile environment of escalating violence and discrimination. For this, he turns the camera towards his family, consisting of his ageing mother and father, and to himself. Made using footage shot over the span of a few years, he succeeds in taking the audience inside his mindscape, to make us feel what he feels when he listens to the constant stream of hate speech and watches visuals of gruesome violence in news reports and in social media streams.

Ahmad ruminates on the question of rootedness and how being uprooted from one’s home or city can impact a person or a family. He chronicles the everyday lives of his parents, interspersing it with clippings of hate speech against his community heard in mainstream news channels. In a poignant moment, he takes his mother to an empty Shaheen Bagh, which three years back witnessed a protest of women against the Citizenship Amendment Act, and speaks of the risks of shooting the footage. The mother tells him that she has to do atleast this for him.

Bangladeshi documentary filmmaker Humaira Bilkis’s Things I Could Never Tell My Mother is also shot mostly inside her home, chronicling the changes in her mother’s viewpoints over a period.

The mother, who in her younger days used to write beautiful poetry and was of a much more liberal mindset, has now turned deeply religious. She cannot accept the fact that her daughter has become a filmmaker and pesters her to get married. The documentary, which begins with funny repartees between the mother and daughter, slowly evolves into a moving tale of a daughter attempting to find a pathway to her mother’s mind, to understand why she thinks what she thinks, rather than rejecting her for her views. This approach also brings about a slow transformation in the mother, which is all captured in the camera.

One common factor of all these documentaries is the immense courage that is required from the filmmakers in baring their personal lives, warts and all, before a larger audience. For most of them, the process is a personal journey of understanding themselves, rather than just another documentary to send to a film festival. Coupled with this is the experimentation in form, which only takes forward the art of documentary making, opening up immense possibilities for the future.