In July 2015 Lamakaan curator Nayeem reached out to me asking if i would be interested in speaking anything about documentary filmmaking under their Cinema Talk series. I wasn’t sure what i’d engage with but got excited and eventually materialised into ‘Ways of Seeing’ – Conversations on ways of looking at Documentary Films on 31st July that year.
And I engaged with the following conflicts and context.
“Is it possible to engage a thought keeping fiction and non-fiction films on the same plane and explore how we ‘see’ them?”
“In a place like Hyderabad, overpowered by 300-crore club mainstream ‘films’, talking about no-returns-promised documentary films is surely interesting and challenging; more so in a place like Lamakaan, with such a diverse audience/ crowd hopping in and out. Given this backdrop, it is only natural to have narrow popular notions about a documentary when you position it as another ‘film’.
After all it doesn’t have that money or stars; they don’t show in the theaters; they don’t ‘seem’ to have any entertainment; they are too complicated to engage with; they show poverty, issues, problems and what not! These are only a few but there are loads of other interesting popular notions we get to hear only to make a Documentary film more complicated, inaccessible and one that’s boring. It’s an irony that the history of Cinema starts with documentary film and today we ‘perceive’ it as ‘lesser cousin’ to the mainstream fiction.
Being a film buff myself I have had my own journey of growing through these popular notions and realizing how fun, empowering, adventurous and expressive documentary films can be. And took it up as a career for the sheer excitement it promised. Through this talk I want to explore all the impressions/ ideas/ notions/ perceptions we as filmmakers/ audiences carry about documentary films and share my own excitement about them as a practitioner leading to a collective realization of ‘ways of looking at documentary films.'”
With these questions I engaged the people present for the evening.
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