Still feels like a dream: Rintu Thomas

Rintu Thomas, the co-director of Writing with Fire, talks about the award-winning film’s journey

Rintu Thomas calls her award-winning film, Writing with Fire, co-directed with her partner Sushmit Ghosh under their Black Ticket Films banner, “literally the first offspring we had.” The couple, who got married in 2015, started working on it the year after and went on to spend the next five years with it, travelling to rural Uttar Pradesh repeatedly to shoot.  “My mother is not happy with the comparison,” says Rintu who was here in the city last month for a screening of the film at the Bangalore International Centre in collaboration with Vikalp, Bengaluru. “But after 13 years of making films, this is our first feature film together.” 

Writing with Fire is a gripping, beautifully shot film, focusing on the lives and work of three journalists who are part of Khabar Lahariya, an independent, media organisation run entirely by Dalit women. “At its heart, the film is a meditation on power,” she says, of what she calls an intersectional film infused with hope. “We knew once it was made, a diverse audience would resonate with it.” 

The three women, whose stories unfurl over the course of the film, are very different: the most senior, Meera Devi, is confident and self-assured, the much younger Suneeta Prajapati is dynamic and feisty while the third, Shyamkali Devi, though more reticent than her colleagues, is incredibly hardworking and tenacious. 

“The fact that the three of them had very different personalities and personal histories added to the triptych we wanted. Yet, at the same time, there was a common thread between all of them: believing in journalism as an act of justice,” says Rintu, adding that the filmmakers had chosen the women based on their own unique voices and styles. The film looked at these three women as journalists as well as offered viewers a glimpse into their personal worlds, she adds. “It was the professional and the personal in a symphony with each other.” 

Going by the number of awards and accolades the film has been garnering, including an Academy Award nomination, two Sundance wins and most recently, a Peabody Award in the documentary category in May. “Everything that has happened around the film still feels like a dream,” she adds. “You hope, and you create, but you never think such a journey will happen.” 

Documenting the world 

Rintu and Sushmit met at Jamia Millia Islamia University, where they were both studying mass communications, graduating in 2008. “It was a very dynamic space,” remembers Rintu, adding that the first film they made together was a student documentary called Flying Inside My Body, a film about the photographer and queer activist, Sunil Gupta. “That was the beginning of our working relationship,” she says.