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Documentaries, long relegated to alternative screens, are now wooing multiplex audiences in India with unprecedented creative fervour

“I think somewhere at the back of your mind, you still harbour the notion that documentaries are boring and dull,” Nisha Pahuja gently counters a question during a phone interview with Open. I had asked if documentaries need to be more cinematic to bring audiences to theatres. Her documentary, The World Before Her, has become the highest- grossing and most talked-about documentary in recent times, catapulting the Indian-Canadian filmmaker into the limelight. It released in multiple theatres across India on 6 June, just after a Right-wing dispensation came to assume power in the country with a decisive mandate. This film—with its conflicting worlds of a Miss India pageant and a Hindu fundamentalist camp for girls—always had the potential to capture the zeitgeist. After three weeks of successful runs in multiple metros across India, it released theatrically in Chandigarh on 18 July, making a foray into smaller territories—something unimaginable for documentaries in India. That it came with the Anurag Kashyap stamp of approval certainly helped. It has now been nominated for an Emmy award this year in the Outstanding Coverage of a Current News Story category—a first for any Indian documentary.

The Facebook page of yet another documentary, Katiyabaaz—which portrays the state of dystopia and desperation caused by electricity crises in Kanpur—is awash with updates of numberless glowing reviews in the media, and film festival screenings in places like London, Vienna, San Francisco, Berlin and Rio. The latest update proudly proclaims: ‘Finally presenting what you all have been waiting for. The first look of our movie that is all set to hit the theatres on the 22nd of August.’

Proposition for a Revolution, which focuses on the phenomenon of the Aam Aadmi Party, is another documentary which is gaining momentum before its release. The film is being produced by Anand Gandhi of Ship of Theseus fame; and just like in Nisha Pahuja’s case, having a recognised name from the industry behind it has definitely added that extra edge to its already successful campaign to raise awareness in the run-up to a theatrical release slated for the end of 2014.

The documentary film form is steadily experiencing a ‘second wave’ of sorts in India. And backing this wave are theatrical releases, which are popularising a genre often perceived as staid and colourless. Or perhaps it is the other way around—since documentaries now have a substantial following, commercial distributors are toying with the idea of releasing them. Whichever came first, the fans or the support and infrastructure, the result is that a number of agencies in the internet era have conspired to make documentaries ‘cooler’ and more ambitious in scale.

Take the case of the ‘hybrid’ documentary Placebo by Abhay Kumar, revolving around the demands and anxieties of attaining academic excellence in India. The film has found many champions in the industry, Nisha Pahuja being one of them. “It is such a powerful film. It pushes the boundaries of storytelling beyond anything one can imagine. It is far more engaging than any other film playing in the cinemas today.” Anurag Kashyap’s company AKFPL is presenting the documentary in India. Its crowdfunding teaser on YouTube is an other-worldly experience and is testament to the chutzpah of a generation of filmmakers raised in a digital age. The trail of comments below the teaser has fans crying out to know the release date of this masterpiece-in-the-making.

Noted film critic MK Raghavendra is certain that the documentary film format can do well with urban audiences even though it may not be able to trump box-office figures of major Bollywood feature films. He sees the power of commercial documentaries as an extension of the visceral realism of filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap. “Fiction films like The Lunchbox (2013) and Madras Cafe (2013) are already realistic in a new way for commercial cinema, and the documentary only stretches their limits,” says Raghavendra, “There is an audience which wants to see aspects of reality to which it was not exposed, and the documentary can step in. I can think of many subjects which will get the attention of this audience immediately: scandals in sport, the 2014 elections, etcetera.”

To make documentaries commercially viable in India, new material needs to be delivered in visually arresting ways. Previously released documentaries like Gulabi Gang (2014) and Supermen of Malegaon (2012), both of which had moderately successful runs at the box office, have combined the attributes of fiction films with hard-boiled reality to highlight the human drama.

Shiladitya Bora is the programming head of PVR’s Director’s Rare, an arm of the prosperous multiplex chain PVR Cinemas, and the only mainstream platform for documentaries in India, apart from slots on some television channels. Director’s Rare has access to 43 cities in India, but most of the documentary releases take place in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad. He confirms that the most successful Indian documentary in terms of box-office collections has been Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her . He also claims that the highest number of screening days for any Indian documentary has been five weeks, registered by Dylan Mohan Gray’s Fire in the Blood (2013). There are several important factors that are taken into account before allowing a documentary to be released under Director’s Rare. “The first question we ask ourselves is ‘Will I pay Rs 200 to watch it on the big screen?’ In addition to that, the demand for the documentary, the buzz around the film, festival screenings and awards, the response if released abroad [are some of the other elements taken into consideration].” Bora reveals that the number of people coming to watch documentaries has increased by a factor of four or five since PVR’s Director’s Rare was started in 2011, although international independent films and regional films are still the most sought after and generate the most revenue.

But securing a commercial release is hardly the most cherished dream of Indian documentary makers, painfully aware as they are of the many frustrating stumbling blocks along the way. And the biggest is that of funding. No other multiplex chain or prominent standalone cinema hall in the country has followed the PVR example of creating a separate slot for alternative cinema. Besides, Director’s Rare does not bear the costs of publicity and promotions for any documentary. Procuring funds for making a documentary is hard enough in India, and for an independent filmmaker to release a movie theatrically, there has to be an intensive cost-benefit analysis to factor in all the added expenses that come with creating the requisite buzz around a movie.

Nisha Pahuja is one of the few filmmakers who devised a smart strategy to make her documentary reach the widest possible audience. It took her four years to complete her film, which was bankrolled primarily by funding agencies in the UK and Germany. It went on to win numerous awards in some of the most prestigious film festivals, including Tribeca (New York) and the Hot Docs film festival. After the gruesome episode of the 2012 Delhi gang-rape, Pahuja knew her documentary had gained a new salience. “Every ideology needs some form of manifestation for it to remain a talking point. My film had to be seen, so that the focus on women’s rights did not shift. I devised a campaign around the film. I started reaching out to NGOs, launched fundraisers, and enhanced our social media presence. What I needed was a theatrical release. Shiladitya Bora was interested in the documentary for a long time. But I wasn’t willing to release the movie until someone big from the film industry came on board. Roping in Anurag Kashyap was part of the strategy.” Her ‘Kickstarter’ campaign was initiated in February 2014, and she managed to raise more than Rs 32 lakh through crowd-funding. She considers herself singularly lucky to have achieved this success as a documentary filmmaker. “You need a market model that is supportive of your kind of vision. We just can’t keep showing movies for free anymore.”

However, even with a spike in audience interest, very few documentaries in India have actually managed to rake in profits through commercial releases. Sanjay Kak, the firebrand filmmaker of critically acclaimed documentaries like Jashn-e-azadi and Red Ant Dream, considers the benefits of theatrical releases to be extremely limited. “Filmmakers have to invest in a Digital Cinema Package and then find the money to do their own publicity. At the very least, we are talking about Rs 10- 20 lakh. To recover that, you need ticket sales to cross twice that amount at least—even at very inflated multiplex rates. That’s a lot of tickets to sell in order to recover just this initial investment, forget about the cost of production of the film,” he reveals. Besides, all theatrical releases have to follow the censorship rules of the land. This eventuality usually discounts the possibility of viewing on the big screen creations of documentary veterans like Sanjay Kak and Anand Patwardhan, who would not allow any deletions or re-edits of their unflinching critiques. In India, as in the West, theatrical releases engender a form of documentary film production that does not disturb the status quo too much and attempts to meet the standards of what is seen as viable. Kak defines ‘viable’ as “films that must be ‘character-driven’, that must have a clearly discernible ‘narrative arc’—and if possible, give us redemption at the end”.

While it is true that the alternative screening circuit—which includes film festivals, cultural centres, cafes, books stores, educational institutes, museums and galleries—is much more vibrant in India, there is no denying the almost mystical charm that the big screen holds for any filmmaker. The commercial release of a documentary earns that enviable review in a broadsheet or a magazine,which in turn stimulates a good deal of chatter around the film, especially on important issues and concerns the filmmaker had set out to unravel in the first place. Surely, this new band of intrepid filmmakers dissolving boundaries between art house and masala films to inform, educate, cajole, shock and mesmerise us also deserve a chance, don’t they?

DocumentariesIndian cinemamultiplexes