While this has been an incredible year for Indian documentaries, it’s been an incredible year for Indian documentaries abroad, an important distinction. Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes became the first Indian film to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing With Fire won the Audience Award and the Special Jury Award: Impact for Change at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival before it went on to become the first-ever Indian title to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Last year, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Oeil d’or award for the Best Documentary. Each of these documentaries cover critical moments during the BJP government’s tenure. None of them have screened here yet.
Despite this, Shukla is confident of releasing While We Watched in India. Perhaps some of his optimism comes from his experience with An Insignificant Man, which went on to become one of India’s most successful documentaries. Not only did it release theatrically, but the film also ran for eight weeks. However, this came at the end of a prolonged battle with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which initially denied An Insignificant Man a release and then demanded major edits, including the removal of references to major political parties (Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party). Ultimately, the film was cleared by the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal and released without cuts.
“Until and unless we make our journalists better, we cannot make our journalism better. I don’t think that people across the political and news spectrum will disagree that our news needs to be better rendered,” Shukla said. “I’m an optimistic person in general. I believe somewhere that we are all working and building towards a better world.”
This is an outlook Shukla is carrying with him into his next project, a hostage drama. “I’ve made two films that have been very serious, and where I was like: I must make a very serious point about systems with these films. Now I’m having fun,” he said.