INDIA’S DOCUMENTARY WAVE
Indian OTTs are not vastly different from traditional TV networks. Reality shows that revolve around weddings or Bollywood tend to get greenlit easily ( Indian Matchmaking, The Big Day, The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives). But, as Tanya Bami, series head, Netflix India, says, they’ve also made bets on shows, specials and documentaries for a wideranging local and global audience. “This has paid off with big wins for our nonfiction slate. We’ve seen this with the 2023 Academy Award winner The Elephant Whisperers and most recently, the International Emmy for Comedy for Vir Das: Landing.”
Netflix has also been bullish about true crime documentaries, such as Curry & Cyanide: The Jolly Joseph Case and The Hunt for Veerappan. Their latest is The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth, one of its most stylishly produced true crime shows — with enough scepticism about the “truth”, and a structure that makes this absurd and shocking case cogent.
Complicating the gaze
A filmmaker who has been a witness to the genre’s evolution is Nishtha Jain, a pioneer in narrative documentary storytelling in India. She made
Gulabi Gang in 2012 — on the lives of a Bundelkhand women’s group that fights oppression, violence and caste dominance. Jain shares how she and her producers couldn’t get Netflix to buy Gulabi Gang. “At best, OTTs want a modified reality that everyone can consume. In their defence, however, it’s not easy to show bold content in India.”
Narrative documentaries “complicate the gaze and celebrate the plurality and complexity of our existence”. Her last film, The Golden Thread (2022), was set outside of Kolkata, and looks at the lives of jute workers. It is still doing the rounds of international film festivals. Her forthcoming film is on the farmer protests of 20202021.
Tanuja Chandra’s docuseries Wedding.con, which dropped on Amazon Prime Video this year, borders on docufiction but stays unflinchingly with the voices and emotions of her subjects: Indian women who have undergone extreme distress because of matrimonial frauds. A director of feature films, BBC Studios approached Chandra to direct the series. “I feel funding should be much more generous. So many documentary producers work on abysmally low budgets. Having said that, I do know that OTT has made audiences at least become aware of the beauty of documentary films,” she says. The responses to her first nonfiction project have been overwhelming. “Documentary is a thing of slowburn, though. It’ll be many months before we know the extent to which our show has touched people. And deep down, I know it’ll be extensive.”
An older generation would remember Doordarshan documentaries about social issues that ran like message films. There was something noble, and deathly boring, about them. Today, the best documentaries don’t run on binaries. The nomination of To Kill a Tiger is another propeller to Indian narrative storytellers to “complicate the gaze”.
The writer and critic is based in Mumbai.
So many documentary producers work on abysmally low budgets. Having said that, I do know that OTT has made audiences at least become aware of the beauty of documentary films TANUJA CHANDRA, whose docuseries Wedding.con dropped on Amazon Prime Video this year