Marching in the Dark, Kinshuk Surjan’s moving and inspiring documentary on the widows of farmers who died by suicide in Maharashtra, got Special Jury Mention for Human Rights Award at CPH: DOX, won Gender Sensitivity Award at the Dharamshala International Film Festival, Best International Documentary Award at DocAviv, Israel, Young Critics Award and Audience Award at the Biografilm Festival, Italy, and Special Mention at the Zurich Film Festival, Switzerland. It was featured in Belgium at Docville and the Festival des Libertés, selected for Hot Docs in Canada, screened at the Silk Road International Film Festival in China, Dok Leipzig in Germany and MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.
While focused on one of the young widows, Sanjeevani, it’s about a group of rural women discovering inner strength, resilience as well as fun, laughter and camaraderie in their shared loss and grief and getting healed in the company of each other. While challenging their patriarchal universe, the women also aim at securing financial independence to ensure a brighter future for their children.
A film about empowerment through female solidarity, it is one of the four Indian titles eligible in the Best Documentary Feature category at the Oscars. The other three are Nishtha Jain’s Farming the Revolution, Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes and Anand Patwardhan’s The World Is Family.
A graphic designer turned filmmaker hailing from Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, Kinshuk Surjan is the son of late Lalit Surjan, editor-in-chief of the prominent Hindi newspaper Deshbandhu.
He spoke to CE about his long journey into researching and shooting the film, editing it out of 150 hours of footage, collaborating with voices like Sanjeevani and challenging the stereotypical portrayals often seen in contemporary films. Excerpts:
Have you closely seen the reality that you have captured in the film?
My grandfather was a farmer. My mother’s village, Berdi, is on the border of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. There is a special place (in the heart) for the fields and farming. But that aside, there was this farmers march from Nashik to Mumbai in 2018 and after a long time there was a sense of hope and not just a passive resignation about what had been happening. So, the name of the film comes from there, because the farmers marched in the dark at night.
Also, in 2013 I made another film on this subject called Pola. It was given the national film student award at the FTII. I guess it was only once or twice that they did something like this. Pola is a festival where they celebrate the bulls, cattle and the practice of agriculture. Even though there'd have been a suicide in a farmer family, they’d continue to celebrate the festival. That film was from a child's point of view, who fears losing his own father when he sees that his friend's father has committed suicide.
Making it made me decide to take to filmmaking. I assisted filmmaker Ruchika Oberoi. I won the Doc Nomads fellowship in Europe and made several films as part of the programme. My graduation film, about three generations of cyclists pushing their son to also become a cyclist, won the Flemish Wild Card, one of the biggest awards for students’ cinema that gives them money to make their next film. It then enabled me to make Marching in the Dark.
Where did you travel to research on the subject? And when did you shoot it?
It was a very long journey. Nashik, Pune, Kolhapur, Satara. I don't know if I was even ready for the film in the beginning. I was tackling the subject of farmers’ suicide in a roundabout way. First, I wanted to do a film around kushti (wrestling), because some farmers don't want a future in farming for their kids. So, they send them to learn kushti. Then I got to know that some boys find it difficult to get married because there too many suicides around. I even got to talk to a matchmaker for that.
I kept going round for a whole year. I did get a lot of stories but how do you shoot something like this with so much grief and trauma involved? I started filming in 2019. The entire 2018 was spent in just finding a way to shoot. People do tell their stories, but should you just point the camera at their face? How do you deal with memory? How do you deal with grief? That was the most challenging aspect—of not knowing how to shoot and how to find hope.
2020-2021 the project broke down. We kept shooting whatever we could, but with a lot of fear, hoping not to cause any harm to anyone. But then I was also involved in getting people vaccinated. The film is only a very minute part of a larger process.
You have got great access to people like Sanjeevani. How did you manage that? And how did you define your own gaze on them…
How do you subvert the hierarchy of gaze? How do you transport the viewer on a sort of an equal plane with the people you are shooting? How do you get to the corporeal potential of an image? Documentaries these days have begun to fall into two categories—poetic or intimate, and then there is the sociopolitical. The marriage of the two is rare. How do you sense the breath, the touch, if a pin is hurting someone, what they are feeling? I feel as artists we have done disservice in that people don’t want to watch documentaries. Who will want to watch a documentary on farmers’ suicides on Netflix? As artists we have followed a Griersonian [Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson] model where the exposition is way more important than the form. But the form and the gaze and everything is what I hope will bring you closer to the person and see it as a story. You see it as a film that you want to watch, that you'll be entertained by, and maybe you will learn something and be inspired by the marvellous people it deals with. But in many contemporary documentaries either the gaze is all about the camera looking down on the subject, or sometimes it’s like they just didn't have time to even sit down with the person. Sometimes it's so idealized and romanticized that it creates an otherly version.
The power is with us, people in the cities who make these images and images do influence policies. So how will policy be made for something which hasn’t had a good image created for itself?
I think, as artists, we don't have the patience to be there in the village and I experienced the struggle in the beginning with my team even though my crew really was the most patient. So, I just wanted to reflect that patience for myself. That’s why we did it all on the tripod. Then there was the attempt at whether the film can be more intimate, if it can have more corporeal, kinaesthetic potential so that you feel what the person is feeling.
But the access was definitely very difficult, because I was visiting all the houses, yet I didn't want to film. In a way, people are so generous and kind that if you sit with them enough and don't ask anything, at some point, they tell you themselves. It’s because nobody has asked them, nobody has cared for them. So, if they feel a genuine connection, people start telling. But you don't want to record that. What should I tell them? That all will be well. That you'll be okay. For many nights it kept haunting me. I also found a school in Satara where the kids of the farmers who committed suicide come from. But how do you record with a kid who's suffering from the loss of both of his parents? The horror stories are really haunt you. I wish I’d have documented all the stories I came across, but I was foolish to not write them down.
At a certain point, I found out that Hamid Dabholkar does these sessions where he talks to men and women regarding suicides and depression. And then, because he didn't have time, I found another NGO through a good friend of mine who's also my co-producer Arya [Rothe]. She’s also a great filmmaker. She made A Rifle and a Bag. Her friend’s mother runs an NGO called Manav Lok. And through them I found another person called Dr Poddar, who turned out to be a colleague of Hamid Dabholkar and he worked with men with depression. I told him that in this long period that I had been traveling, I met two kinds of people. Women who have broken all the stereotypes and barriers of society, who have overcome their grief in a beautiful way, have strength and resilience, and they always have such a great sense of humour. On the other hand, are the ones who are grieving, and their pain is so raw that they also want to commit suicide themselves. If we could work together with them. So, he started talking to them about depression, its signs. And, in a naive fashion, not knowing what will come out of it, we started filming.
It felt a bit more reciprocative that we were not asking questions. If somebody felt compelled to tell their story they would. So, we came together in a sort of a collective. Manav Lok and Manasvini, the two NGOs supported us through this process. They helped us to get to people, around 15 to 20 of them, women who wanted to participate in this.
The film is born out of a huge social engagement. In one session they were moved to the core that they would have done something if they knew what depression was, if we knew that there was even a little bit of hope. Farmers’ suicides can't be stopped just by curing depression. It's a larger issue. But we started talking about whatever little can be done at that crucial moment. Questions started coming to Dr Poddar. Why don't women commit suicide? We also have as much tension to deal with. These conversations were so brilliant that I recorded them even though I didn't even have proper sound. Sanjeevani [one of the film’s main protagonists] spoke about how their own pain and grief become much smaller when they come to such meetings. She was the only one who spoke beyond self. She was also raw in pain. We are talking about 2019 and 2016 is when she lost her husband. Yet she was able to talk about others. This was an insight about grief that I had never had. That being there for someone else or listening to others is a way of healing yourself. That gave a reason and a purpose to continue.
Some people were very interested, some left. Whoever found it meaningful kept engaging. It then transformed from just talking about depression, it evolved beyond. It became a space about gossiping, about making friends, about discussions.
One has certain presumptions about a film on farmers’ suicides. You deal with several aspects—economic, personal, physical, psychological, social…
The first cut was 6 hour long. Dr Poddar thought of it as addressing the psychological issues. My drive was to see if storytelling could be a way of healing. Like Parimala Tai (one of the people in the film), who is much older, has seen life and she tells that it will be fine, one can get some kind of hope from that.
It transformed into a space where they could celebrate festivals, sing songs, gossip. They had a sense of humour and could laugh on topics we don’t—domestic violence, caste, alcoholism. Also, more serious conversations happened. How alcohol changes the mind.
There is a subversive streak in the women, whether they're teaching themselves something or applying for a job, or playing Holi against the traditional diktats for widows, and there is a certain sense of solidarity. Are these the messages of the film—subversion and solidarity?
Absolutely correct. I miss being there in that group because the kind of jokes that were cracked, we didn't get. Also, because of my stubbornness with having a camera fixed. But then there was an overall ideological thing.
Was any bit scripted also?
Yes, but it was done together with Sanjeevani.
In 2019 I was not even allowed to step inside. We didn't have much of a friendship. But then it kept evolving and then we developed such a beautiful friendship that she started telling me things about her life. What happened to her happened to my maasi (aunt) too when her husband died. She told me little things about the kids. Hers is a beautiful story. She first didn't want to get married. Then she got forcibly married. She wanted to study. So that part is again not there in the film anymore. How she came into the family and how she got a job during Corona which we were not able to shoot. Whatever we were not able to shoot, we scripted it together, and almost every other month we would sit down and see what images we had visualised together. A lot of filmmakers like Roberto Minervini do it, film people’s lives. Vittorio DeSica did it long back. We have had Satyajit Ray doing that.
The film was also getting very wordy, focused on just the meeting place. That’s also why I started filming the life of Sanjeevani. The beautiful thing in the film is that she has evolved into such a dynamic, magnanimous person, going out and helping others. All that wasn’t scripted. We only scripted Sanjeevani’s personal life that we had missed out on. When she gets a job or when Bubbly [her daughter] gets a cycle. Two-three scenes in the beginning were written together. Scripted is a word looked down upon. But yes, we did it together. We planned them, we reenacted them.
She's got a tremendous presence on screen…
I guess she has. She could really be the next Smita Patil.
I was thinking along the same lines, and then feeling very bad, that we tend to look at reality also through the lens of cinema...
Like all the guys, yeah.
Has Sanjeevani seen the final film?
She came to the premiere in Copenhagen in CPH: DOX. People were so inspired. The kind of love she got was amazing. She is not overwhelmed, stands her ground. Everybody wanted to talk to her, and she was just calmly answering. Something personal that happened is that I lost my aunt in 2020 to cancer. And then I could console my mother from this learning from Sanjeevani, how she consoled. So, I guess we were bound by grief as well.