I am quite sure that most of us have grown up watching films made by these great directors. But quite interestingly, not many people are aware of the fact that apart from making feature films, these directors have also made some of the most iconic documentaries.
Here is a list of some of the famous directors and the documentaries that they have made.
- Sikkim – Satyajit Ray
Without doubt Satyajit Ray remains one of the finest directors India has ever produced. Interestingly, not many people know that Ray has even made some really exciting documentaries.
Through this documentary Ray painted the real picture of then Sikkim. The Indian government thought that the film was promoting Sikkim and decided to ban it.
The ban was lifted years after Ray’s death. Apart from this controversial documentary, Ray also made a documentary on Rabindranath Tagore and one on famous Bengali author and his father, Sukumar Ray. All his documentaries have received rave reviews.
- Faces After The Storm – Prakash Jha
Prakash Jha made this documentary years before he made hard-hitting political and social dramas like Gangajaal and Rajneeti. This documentary, made in a true Prakash Jha style, dealt with the issue of communal violence in Bihar.
It won the Filmfare award for the Best Documentary of the year – 1983. The documentary also won a National Award the same year.
- Sonal – Prakash Jha
This documentary deals with the life and struggle of famous dancer Sonal Mansingh. The documentary showed her zest and passion for dance and how this passion inspired her to achieve great success.
It was awarded the Golden Lotus – Best Documentary 2002 (National Award).
- Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker – Shyam Benegal
Shyam Benegal is one of the most respected filmmakers in India. He is often considered as the uncrowned prince of Indian parallel cinema. Apart from features, Benegal has made countless documentaries. Many considered this one as one of his best documentaries.
The documentary was also awarded the prestigious National Award. Apart form it, Nehru, a documentary he made on our former prime minister is also worth watching.
5. Inshallah, Football – Ashvin Kumar
Ashvin Kumar is the youngest Indian whose work has been nominated for the Oscars. His films and documentaries often revolve around sensitive and controversial topics.
This sensitive documentary deals with the life of a Kashmiri kid, who dreams to play football in Brazil and how the politics in Kashmir influences his life. The documentary also won the prestigious National Award.
- Children Of A Desired Sex – Mira Nair
Mira Nair is one of the few directors of Indian origin who has received fame and recognition even outside the country. This documentary deals with the serious issue of female feticide. It also throws light on the controversial topic of abortion.
7. India Cabaret – Mira Nair
This is another acclaimed documentary by Mira Nair, which each and every one should watch. The film shows how the society stereotypes a woman. It shows how some society quickly brands a woman as immoral.
- Jeevan Smriti – Rituparno Ghosh
Through this documentary famous director Rituparno Ghosh shows us the important moments and memories from the life of Rabindranath Tagore.
9. Ustad Allauddin Khan – Ritwik Ghatak
Many people consider Ritwik Ghatak as one of the best directors our country has ever produced. It deals with the life of legendary sarodi Ustad Allauddin Khan. He also taught the famous Ravi Shankar.
- The Forgotten Army – Kabir Khan
The New York and Ek Tha Tiger director has not only made big budget feature films but he has also made a hard hitting short film and a documentary too. This documentary was based on Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army and praised by each and everybody. This documentary also happens to be the first thing he ever directed.
- Through Eyes Of A Painter – M.F. Husain
Not many people know that the famous painter was also a great connoisseur of films. This 18 minute documentary, was praised by each and everyone at home and abroad. The film went on to win the prestigious golden bear at the famous Berlin International film festival.
- An Encounter With Faces – Vidhu Vinod Chopra
Today he might be more famous for producing films like Munnabhai and 3 idiots, but one can’t deny the fact that he is also an extremely talented director. This documentary is about Mumbai street children. The documentary received a number of awards both at home and abroad.
These documentaries show us why these directors became such great pioneers of art and cinema.
The historical background of Documentary in India
On the historic midnight of August 14 and 15, 1947, India became independent from British rule. First Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech, “A Tryst with Destiny,” was recorded by independent filmmaker Ambles J. Patel with two cameras and sound equipment. There were no official film units of the Government of India or other Indian filmmakers to film this historic moment and the subsequent nationwide celebrations.
That was 57 years ago, but today India boasts a vibrant independent documentary filmmaking community. Indian documentary filmmakers have today carved a niche for themselves in the nonfiction genre world with their creativity and hard-hitting works on subjects ranging from Indian arts and social concerns to natural history. Traditional Indian images of the Taj Mahal, droughts and poverty-stricken villagers have given way to films covering a spectrum of social, societal, environmental and human issues facing India. Films on issues such as human rights, censorship, gender roles, communal politics, individual liberty and sexual identity form the new Indian documentary filmmaking community.
But the Indian documentary filmmaking tradition dates back well before independence. In 1888 a short film of wrestlers Pundalik Dada and Krishna Navi at Bombay’s Hanging Gardens was filmed by Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar. This was the first recorded documentary film in India. In the 1930s, filmmakers D.G. Tendulkar, who had studied motion pictures in Moscow and Germany, and K.S. Hirelekar, who had studied culture films in Germany, brought the latest concepts of documentary film and laid the foundation of the documentary movement in India.
In April 1948 the Indian Government formed the Films Division and described it as “the official organ of the Government of India for the production and distribution of information films and newsreels.” Screenings of Films Division documentaries were made mandatory before feature films at all cinemas in India. From June 1949, the Films Division started regular distribution of newsreels and documentaries through its own distribution set-up. Films were dubbed in five languages—English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Telegu—and 97 films were produced in 1949-50. The Films Division soon became one of the most important sources of public information, and it tried to reach out to people in the remotest corners of India. Many exciting films emerged from the Films Division—S.N.S. Sastry’s I Am 20, Fali Bilimoria’s The House That Ananda Built, Sukhdev’s India 1967 and M.F. Husain’s Through the Eyes of a Painter. The Films Division today is Asia’s biggest documentary and short film producer, having to its credit innumerable films that have won laurels at home and abroad during the last 56 years.
In the 1950s Burmah-Shell, a private company, invested in making training films and sales promotion films of outstanding merit. Canadian filmmaker James Beveridge, who had worked at National Film Board of Canada and was a protégé of John Grierson, produced and directed several Burmah-Shell Films in India.
In 1978, An Encounter with Faces, Vinod Chopra’s documentary about Bombay street children, went all the way to Hollywood, where it was nominated for an Oscar. The film also earned nine out of 12 awards at the Oberhausen Film Festival, and won the top prizes at festivals in Milan, Leipzig and Finland. At the International Film Festival of India, it won the Golden Peacock. The technique of the film was singled out for special mention: direct, unwavering conversations with children, neither patronizing nor pitying.
The advent of digital video technology has further revolutionized the Indian documentary technique. Traditionally Indian documentary overwhelmingly favored the didactic social documentary, but now filmmakers have moved towards the internationally accepted direct cinema style, adopting its realist aesthetic and reliance on interviews, while continuing to retain Griersonian voiceover narration.
Until the advent of the satellite television boom in India in the early 1990s, state broadcaster Doordarshan’s two national terrestrial channels were the only TV networks in India where documentary films could be screened. The launch of Discovery Channel in India in August 1995 and the subsequent entry of National Geographic Channel in 1998 created further avenues for Indian filmmakers to screen their work. Discovery Channel has also launched Animal Planet in India and will add a Lifestyle channel in October 2004. India’s largest TV network, Zee TV, has announced plans to launch a documentary channel called Khoj in the next few months.
In addition to the broadcasters, the nonprofit Public Service Broadcasting Trust was formed to support the production of independent documentary films. The trust receives its funding from the Ford Foundation and Doordarshan. According to Rajiv Mehrotra, an internationally renowned filmmaker and the founder of PSBT, “We do not seek sensationalism or explicit confrontation—though that might bring in TV ratings—but to provide quiet, considered insights and, dare I add, wisdom to focus on contemporary predicaments and valuable elements of our heritage. We encourage filmmakers to work with the newer, less expensive digital technologies so that they could explore more innovative treatments and approaches to the documentary, afford more time on location and create truly in-depth, incisive films.” PSBT has already produced over 50 films and has started work on a documentary miniseries: The Story of Indian Broadcasting, which will both evaluate and document the achievements of Public Service Broadcasting in India.
The Indian documentary community has presented cinematic gems and has put Indian images on television screens across the planet. Mike Pandey is the only Asian filmmaker ever to have won the Green Oscar twice at the Wildscreen Festival in the UK, for his documentaries Rogue Elephants of India and Shore Whale Sharks in India. The latter film was shot under extreme conditions and took almost three years to complete. “Shore Whale Sharks in India aimed towards creating policies to support a ban on the killing and trade of whale sharks in India as well as finding sustainable alternatives for the fishermen,” says Pandey. The Earth Matters Foundation set up by Pandey to create the preservation of wildlife in their natural habitat began an awareness campaign to save the whale shark. The campaign successfully got the hunting of this species banned worldwide.
Besides Pandey, several Indian filmmakers, including Anand Patwardhan, Sanjay Kak, Amar Kanwar and Rakesh Sharma, have already carved a niche for themselves on the international documentary stage. Award-winning Patwardhan’s latest documentary, War and Peace (2002), documents activist movements in South Asia since the 1998 nuclear tests in India and Pakistan. Patwardhan has been making documentary films for the past 25 years about human rights issues in India, like street dwellers in Bombay, the rise of religious fundamentalism and the negative impact of globalization.
Kak has carved out a special niche in the echelon of experimental cinema, and his films such as Land, My Land, England (1993), A House and a Home (1993), Geeli Mitti (1985), A Matter of Choice, Harvest of Rain and One Weapon have received awards as well as critical appreciation at film festivals in Paris, Fribourg, Hawaii and Dhaka. His documentary In the Forest Hangs a Bridge won the 1999 Margaret Mead Film Festival Documentary Film Award in the US.
Kanwar, a recipient of a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship, was awarded the Golden Conch-Best Film Award at the 1998 Mumbai International Documentary Film Festival for his film A Season Outside. His next film, A Night of Prophecy (2002), was filmed in several diverse regions of India and features music and poetry of tragedy and protest performed by regional artists.
Sharma’s Final Solution (2003) graphically documents the changing face of right wing politics in India through a study of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat. The film was banned by the Indian censors, even though the film has been acclaimed at international film festivals.
Other Indian films that have fared well on the international film festival circuit include Rahul Roy’s When Our Friends Meet, a film on male sexuality; Barf Snow, a film by Saba Dewan, on trekking with slum girls; and Into the Abyss, Vandana Kohli’s film on depression, for which he won the RAPA 2003 award in India for Best Director.
The Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films was launched in 1990 as a biennial competitive event and is organized by the Films Division, in close cooperation with the State Government of Maharashtra. In this festival, outstanding films in various categories are selected by an international jury for Golden and Silver Conches and hefty cash prizes. The festival aims to serve as a platform where the filmmakers of the world can meet and exchange ideas, explore the possibility of co-production and market their films.
In August 2003 over 300 Indian documentary filmmakers came together to protest the attempt by the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to make censor certificates a mandatory precondition for Indian documentaries entered into the 2004 Mumbai International Film Festival. The documentary filmmaking community saw through this apparently innocuous step, recognizing it as a part of a wider structure of control and repression, where the rights to free speech, dissent and even creative expression are increasingly coming under threat in India. In an unprecedented display of collective resistance, filmmakers from across the country organized around the Campaign Against Censorship, and were successful in forcing the ministry to drop its attempts to introduce censor certification for the festival. The filmmakers then set in motion Vikalp—Films for Freedom, an independent documentary film festival. After a stopover at Bangalore, the celluloid caravan traveled on to Trivandrum, Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata.
The Indian documentary community is now looking at expanding its horizons. Pandey has already been invited to be a jurist for the 2004 Wildscreen, where he is also a finalist for the esteemed Filmmaker for Conservation Award. Vanishing Giants, his film on the elephant crisis in India, is also a finalist for a Panda Award. Patwardhan was the keynote speaker at Silverdocs in the US in June, and Sharma picked up the Wolfgang Staudte award at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.
In the near future it seems there will be a documentary film made by an Indian filmmaker screening at a theater near you….
Indian Documentaries
The story-tellers are finally weaving tales that promise to change the fabric, not just of the country, but of the world!
Stories and Tellers:
India is considered to be a land of storytellers. If you walk down the streets of even small towns here, you will come back enriched with stories from the youngest kid on the block to the oldest grandmother who has lived through generations. Be it a roadside tea stall or a public toilet or a ‘paan-shop’ (betel leaves outlets), everyone has a story. No doubt, story-tellers from India and abroad have taken great pride in documenting their experiences in the country through prose, poetry, pictures and video. With a diverse culture, rich history and a strong base in all forms of Sciences, the nation is a perfect muse for documentary filmmakers.
Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal- from where most of the international cinema from India has emerged- are also the states that have sprouted documentary film-makers. These states have been strong on the socio-political map of India which has given birth to documentaries as a form of education and social awareness. Though almost all the renowned fiction film-makers have popular documentaries to their names, there was a strong breed of specialist Documentary filmmakers – Anand Patwardhan, Sukhdev, John Abraham to name a few- who are some of the earliest popular names known in this craft. They filmed for passion and to bring about a social change. Some of them travelled through villages with projectors and a collection of documentaries to educate and empower the less privileged. The word documentary was a pure social fabric then, not so much a business.
This was further accelerated with the Government of India stepping in with Films Division and an NGO – PSBT (Public Services Broadcasting Trust). While both of them have funds of about Rs. 1 Mn per doc on an average even now and have access to several film festivals, they largely lack in branding and giving quality docs to the world, mostly because of their low budgets, bureaucracy and distribution restrictions. Their stringent policies are yet to be updated to provide co-productions with other countries. Moreover, their lack of quality and compulsory screening of docs in cinema theatres in India during the 90s gave them a notorious equation: Documentaries = Boring Content.
There is also the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association (IDPA) which has been a platform for filmmakers though they are largely limited in their scope for helping them monetize their content. Awards ceremony at the biennial Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) and a few forums and workshops are the limited scopes of this organisation.
Though these organisations are a good starting point for young and experimental doc filmmakers, most of the documentaries are largely classified as ‘reportage’ in the international format of documentaries. A ‘documentary’, in international parlance, needs to be narrated from a character/s point of view. A filmmaker would need a year or more at least to make such a film where he gets close enough to the subject and the character. Hence a significant investment of time and money for serious filmmakers acts as a deterrent for most others who want to take a shortcut to fame.
Global Doc Business:
Though many filmmakers start off with a social angle, quite a few of them have been taking the docs to international markets and monetizing them. Binding together this web of global documentary filmmakers are a maze of film festivals like IDFA (Amsterdam), Hot Docs (Toronto), Dok Leipzig (Germany), Yamagata (Japan) and several smaller but important festivals in countries like Iran, Bosnia to name a few. Moreover, almost all the big film festivals and markets have a documentary section making it the most popular form of story-telling. The size of the industry in sheer numbers of films is comparable with that of the fiction film industry though I would think the revenues are a different ball game altogether. They are well supported by a small but strong clique of sales agents who represent the films for the global market. The buyers and commissioning agents are from TV channels and NGOs and recently from OTT platforms. A significant but often overlooked market comprises educational institutions and a small percentage of these films get theatrical screenings.
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The Pitch:
The pitching forums are the most important part of the doc making process. Every important doc festival has it and there are some who are popular for pitching and networking with the commissioning agents. Most countries known for their doc industry have state and NGO funds that help the doc filmmakers. If your film is not interesting at the pitching stage then it is very rare that the Channels or other platforms would be interested in it once it’s finished. Moreover, pitching happens at every stage of the filmmaking process: pre-production, production, post-production and distribution. Most new filmmakers and a few of the veterans too go through this process till they are well known in the industry and are pursued by the media platforms themselves.
Film festivals:
IDFA is one of the topmost festivals for documentaries in the world- equivalent to a Cannes festival for fiction films. Helmed by Ally Derks till recently, it has seen long queues in sub-zero temperatures for the theatrical screening of docs and also has the IDFA- Bertha fund that supports docs at various stages of completion. Quite a few Indian docs have had its support- Lyari Notes, Menstrual Man, My Name is Salt- to name a few. Some of the other important festivals for Indian docs have been- Dok Leipzig, Sheffield Docs, Hot Docs. More importantly, these festivals serve as a networking platform for all stakeholders to meet and discuss the doc business.
Sales Agents:
Unlike the flamboyant sales agencies for fiction films, their docs counterparts are low-key boutique agencies owned by one or two people. They believe in personal interactions with their filmmakers and are very well organised and focused in building their slate. They are the conduit between the filmmakers and the screening platforms and have also backwards integrated into co-productions and pre-sales. Recently, they have also become very niche by focusing on one or two of the rights that can be majorly fragmented as- TV, Digital, Theatrical and Institutional. Cat n Doc, Cinephil, Widehouse, Visible Film are a few of the agents that Indian filmmakers have worked closely with. These agents have to have their ears close to the ground and know what the programming plans of the doc TV channels are. They normally charge up to 30% as commission on sales other than a fixed fee as the cost of sales.
Media Platforms:
TV channels have been the primary producers and exhibitor of docs. Arte (France, Germany), BBC (UK), NHK (Japan), SBS (Australia), CBC (Canada), YLE (Finland), Rai TV (Italy) are some of the well-known documentary only channels in their respective countries. In India, besides Doordarshan, NDTV screens some of the global docs. Most of the channels have to commission and buying agents and are partly or fully state sponsored. While the commissioning agents are responsible for production (and co-production) of docs, the buyers ensure that their ‘strands’ and ‘library’ is kept full and diverse by constituting a healthy mix of individual docs and series. Co-producing channels usually retain the rights for the territories they beam in and might also have a revenue share.
The typical length of docs for TV are 26″ and 52″. Feature length docs are more than 90″ and are good for theatrical. The popular feature-length docs also have ‘television cuts’ of less than an hour. OTT platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix have pushed the envelope for docs while Vice has grown to a $5Bn + company in just about a decade screening only documentaries. In fact, Netflix has commissioned about 50 feature films globally and 65 documentaries for 2017!
Foundations:
Last but not least foundations like Sundance, ESODocs, European Documentary Network (EDN) have been instrumental in supporting and funding docs. Recently Yes Bank has started a fund for supporting Indian docs.
Future Looks Bright:
Infotainment in India is a growing industry with more channels added each year and generating an ad revenue of about Rs.3 billion. Discovery has rejigged its team and planning a new programming strategy. Epic is repositioning itself and becoming more ‘infotainment’. Vice is launching on multi-platforms with a tie-up with Times of India group. News channels are making more noise and every year more are getting added with niche subjects and regional languages. Indian docs and doc-makers are going big and global with their local stories. Biopics are consistently clocking in profits and now we have one on Sachin Tendulkar releasing this week after several on sports persons from different disciplines. There are more platforms who are buying and investing in real stories as ideas for fiction dry up. The YouTube generation is producing and consuming more content in all forms and platforms. Indians used to only watch movies to forget life. now they want to see different lives on the screen. This augurs well for the documentary industry.
Last week Alexandro Gonzalez Inarritu unveiled a VR version of his immersive film ‘Carne y Arena’ on refugees fleeing their country and is the first such movie to be ever screened at the Cannes festival. Indians have always been leaders in technology globally and it won’t be long before we have our own VR films rooted in realism.
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