MIFF 2016: Open Forum IV—Pointing inwards, pointing outwards

Mathieu Roy, Canadian film-maker and member of the jury at MIFF, a former personal assistant to Martin Scorsese whose films include Ecclestone’s Formula (1) and Surviving Progress, and the feature; Ziba Bhagwagar, ad film maker and former journalist, who has moved on to make all kinds of non-feature films with partner Roohi Dixit, known for her films Freaky Chakra, Spaces between and Scattered Windows, Connected Doors; Kolkata born novelist Devashish Makhija, who assisted Anurag Kashyap on the controversial feature Black Friday and has been making his own short and feature films since then, among them Taandav, Rahim Murge Pe Mat Ro, Aglee Baar and Oonga, and Dylan Mohan Gray, historian turned documentary film-maker, whose Fire in the Blood is a big, rare, documentary success story—were the panelists at yesterday’s Open Forum, organised by the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association (IDPA). An unusual topic was chosen for discussion: ‘Make a documentary film as if you are shooting a feature, and a feature film as if you are shooting a documentary’. Veteran Kamal Swaroop, who teaches screenplay writing and has made some highly off-beat films like Om Dar B Dar, and c the documentaries called Rangbhoomi, Tracing Phalke and Battle for Banaras, was the moderator.

Explaining the origins of the topic, Swaroop recalled that he was finding it very difficult to shoot his film Om Dar B Dar because of lack of finances, and as a way out, he decided to shoot the fiction film in documentary style, imposing artificiality on naturalness, on locations in Ajmer. The two contrasting elements clashed, and what he filmed was the remains. “Story is sacrosanct,” asserted Bhagwagar. But there could still be issues. “If I want a character to walk through a corridor, so that I can capture a waft of light, am I compromising reality?” Similarly, she added, if a person crosses a road, and, for some reason, the cinematographer fails to capture that moment, is it alright to make that person cross the road again? Or, would that be compromising the documentary’s integrity? This example was from her own experience with a documentary crew.

Foreign-educated but now Mumbai-based Gray insisted that the focus should be on distilling a clear and compelling story from a huge mass of footage accumulated during the shooting of documentaries, as is the norm. “You need to understand who you are making the film for.” Roy said he hates all labels. “My favourite directors, Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog, make what are conventionally called feature films and also what are called documentaries. But they themselves just call their work ‘films’.”

Makhija referred to Anurag Kashyap’s insistence on shooting Black Friday at real locales, but using actors to play the real characters who were involved in the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993. When he was making his own film, Oonga, in 2013, set in Orissa’s mining, adivasi belt, he transposed the location to Wai, near Panchgani, Maharashtra, and made 25 real adivasis interact with actors like Seema Biswas and Nandita Das. Was this being true to the documentary or taking liberties, he wondered. “In a feature, the lens of the camera points outwards, while in a documentary, it points inward,” he offered by way of definition. This led to several other definitions of the two genres coming from panelists and the audience.

Swaroop suggested that the difference lies in knowledge of what will happen next. “In a feature, we know what will happen next, whereas in a documentary, we do not.” Bhagwagar felt that the common feature is “Treatment Notes and Mood Board, which we borrow from feature films.”

In the Q & A session at the end, a member from the audience quoted celebrated British suspense film-maker, late Alfred Hitchcock, who is reported to have defined the two genres thus, “In a feature film, the director is God. In a documentary, God is the director.”