‘Was anyone in your film crew disabled / from an indigenous community / LGBTQIA+?’

I am male, I am Indian, I am Muslim, I am a filmmaker. My great grandparents’ home was burnt about five times, my grandparents’ home was burnt once, my best friends’ general store was burnt thrice, my family fled from two homes - all in mindless, hateful religious violence.

While the ‘other’ hated me because I was different, ‘my own’ ostracized me because I wasn’t religious enough for them. But that wasn’t the main part of my childhood experience. While these experiences formed the outer context, the inner context comprised of extreme domestic violence, where each breath was monitored with close scrutiny and could have severe emotional, mental and physical consequences. All of the above happened to me before I had even turned fifteen.

Growing up in such surroundings, my sole respite came from my Mother, my School and the Television set that I would sometimes painstakingly get to access. That 21” screen told me that outside my house, outside my suffering, outside my experience of growing up, there was an entirely different world, an alternate way of life. I yearned to participate in that world, to get out of mine. And somewhere, unknown to me the seeds of a dream were being planted - the dream to grow up and make the films and shows that fascinated me as a child.

Cut to fourteen years later, I did. I renounced everything and plunged into the world of filmmaking. Then the usual struggle began, trying to get work, learn the ropes, hone your craft, ‘network’, all while surviving in Bombay - a city notorious for its housing rent to interfere with your soaring dreams. But while I learnt a lot, unlearnt a lot and will continue to, I always felt the presence of that one quality that most peers struggled with - the vision to decide what story to tell! Albert Camus once said that “Great Art is the result of great torment” and the pain I went through as a child became the fuel for the stories I wanted to tell. But it was hard to convince the gatekeepers in Bombay to sanction my Story, perhaps the quality of the Story wasn’t good enough, perhaps I couldn’t communicate it well enough, perhaps their decisions were based less on merit and more on leverage in the form of a surname or past box office and critical acclaim.

Hence, I decided to back my words with actions. If I couldn’t put my own money into my own Story, how could I expect someone else to! And hence I raised money (and acknowledge the privilege to) from my family and self-produced, wrote & directed a short film, that was a glimpse of the larger Story I wanted to tell. This Short would put a trailer of my Feature out in the world, it would become what Bombay calls a ‘pitch film’. The entire experience turned out to be my film-school! A combined total of one and a half years of writing and then one full year of pre-production, production and post-production - all for a thirty minute film.

Moreover, I rediscovered Bombay and people from the film industry in this process. I was able to access sides of them that I didn’t know existed. When they heard the story, when they understood its ‘personal’ nature, when they realized I was self-producing it, most of them showered love, generosity and warmth. Many didn’t charge a penny, some charged a pittance. The film became community-owned, it became larger than just me.

Inevitably, we arrived at the question of distribution, the crucial ‘Now what? How do we get people to watch this?’ moment. Indie films struggle with distribution, indie shorts don’t even know what distribution is. Barring the odd YouTube channel, your short’s fate is largely limited to becoming an addition to the obese libraries of yet another OTT. But I thought my film, albeit with all its faults, had ‘critical acclaim potential’. Even though the craft felt weak at many a place, I saw people getting moved by portions within the film. And hence it was decided that the film’s journey must be started at Festivals.

The parlance used to describe the ‘Festival circuit’ is not very different from the one used at CAT coaching centres. Make ‘Cloud A’ of your most aspirational festivals, ‘Cloud B’ of decent festivals and ‘Cloud C’ of acceptable festivals while hoping that you don’t need to stoop to ‘Cloud D’ - which would be your desperation festivals. If you feel your film has a chance at ‘Cloud A’, then eligibility rules and people’s practical experience dictate that applying to those prevents you from applying elsewhere, as most of those Festivals refuse to accept your film if it has been ‘premiered’ elsewhere.

Hence my film school continued and this time I needed to learn how to make a press kit, raise money for applications, capture compelling film stills, write summaries and synopses, cut a trailer, design posters, make a festival calendar, estimate chances, prioritize some festivals while sacrificing others, attempt to get fee-waivers and keep diligent track of the entire ‘circuit’.

However, to my utter surprise, I found lots of questions in the ‘Cloud A’ festival applications, to be completely unrelated to the Film. For example - Are you LGBTQIA+? Are you from an indigenous tribe? Are you disabled? What race are you? Was anyone in your crew from one of the above? I didn’t belong to any of the above identities, I had others of my own but I didn’t want to use them in a film festival application. I couldn’t even if I wanted to because I didn’t fit into any of their listed categories.

Why are these questions being asked, I wondered? It is estimated that about 8000 films each are being sent annually to the topmost Festivals. This number would comprise of features, series, shorts, documentaries, anime, experimental, docu-drama, VR/AR and more. Moreover, the mainstream gatekeepers have all of a sudden woken up to the PR potential of a film festival. Hence, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ got a standing ovation when it was screened at Cannes, ‘Gangubai Kathiawadi’ premiered at Berlinale, even ‘Adipurush’ was supposed to premiere at Tribeca. My Film is a labour of love but a self-produced one with lesser known names and no ‘backing’ of any sort. Is the playing field not tough enough already? By asking the above questions, am I going into an even smaller bucket of films that are indie and yet not made by someone from the above communities? Is there a quota and did my film just go into the largest sub-section, thereby limiting its chances even further? I will never know the answers to these questions and although the festival FAQs claim that there is no partiality or favour, why then I ask, are these questions included in the application in the first place!

Let’s go into a flashback. Fresh after I exited my domestically violent situation, I started an NGO. Having the first-hand experience of my life getting transformed spurred me to attempt to empower others. We would go into Colleges and talk about issues such as Religion, Gender, Citizenship and more. But we would use the mediums of theatre, film, photography, games, basically anything that we thought was cool and more importantly, nothing we thought was boring. One of the questions that used to be thrown our way by many College participants, was their opposition of reservation in admissions. ‘Why is someone from a lower-caste being favoured over me when there is no inequality anymore!’ used to be the broad wording of their argument. My instant response was - ‘No inequality anymore? Really?’ The first time someone from a privileged caste was denied something, they cried out for equality, oblivious to and complicit in denying millions their fundamental rights for centuries.

However, it must be understood that even reservations in educations and jobs were conceptualized as an acknowledgement of the harm Indian Society has caused to specific groups of people and hence as an interim measure for them to catch up, ideally cross even further and have ‘true equality’ restored. With history as my witness, neither were they allowed to actually catch up nor did reservations ever cease to exist. They ended up becoming a synonym to a communal riot, being employed at will for the short-term gains of an incapable, undeserving politician. Secondly, education is not filmmaking, the former is a fundamental right, the latter is Art and that too a form of Art that is the refuge of the rebels, the misfits, who more often than not, come to communicate their trauma to the world.

Lastly, favouring the persecuted makes sense at the level of ‘opportunity’, like Neeraj Ghaywan’s commendable initiative to invite Dalit film enthusiasts into his crew and increase diversity. But if this is extended to the level of ‘outcomes’, as someone who has been persecuted for his choiceless identities myself, I am in vehement opposition.

Moreover, who decides the hierarchy of trauma? Is the trauma I have suffered in the name of religion or family lesser than the trauma someone has suffered because of their sexuality or physical abilities or tribal origins? Do they or I even have the agency to decide whether we want to list those identities in a film festival application? Do we want to win primarily because we belong to those identities and not on the merit of our work of Art? I can’t speak for everyone but I do not want to.

Time for a second flashback. In my NGO days, I had been selected by the Government of a powerful country as a prospective future leader and sent on an all-expenses paid trip across the length and breadth of their Country. I was accompanied by two ladies who were first-hand victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy, another lady who worked on the issue of Dalit bride-burning, a fourth lady who worked with Tamil refugees in crisis and a fifth lady with rich journalistic experiences of being Dalit in Maharashtra. Across that month long trip, we sat and dined with leaders of global NGOs and current and past policy makers at the World’s most powerful organizations. Almost everywhere, consistently, every single lady was cut out while I and my experience of religious violence was prioritized, simply because it was the most recent, because it was ‘hot’, because that is where the momentum and money were flowing! On a trip where I became the unexpected Star, I felt nothing but unhappiness, I felt used, I felt more discriminated against in a country that was supposedly celebrating me than in the Country that discriminated against me. My plea, after my years of persecution, was to have the same opportunities as others did and to not be treated differently merely because of my social identity. My plea was not to do to others what had always been done to me.

As a keen observer of Films & Society, I see this phenomenon not limited to Film Festivals alone but Films in general. ‘CODA’ won the Best Picture at the 94th Academy Awards. Was ‘CODA’ a better film than ‘The Worst Person in the World’? Or ‘Flee’? Or ‘The Power of the Dog’? All of these and many more were eligible in the same year. The Oscars have often been polarizing in their decisions but ‘CODA’ also premiered at Sundance, won the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. ‘CODA’ in my opinion, was a routine high-school romcom, the kind we’ve seen hundreds of variants of, in the past three decades. The only difference was that here the protagonist’s parents were deaf. While it is worth celebrating that a mainstream film had deaf lead characters (and Actors), is that enough? Does the film not need to be a superlatively written and directed film to win the single most coveted award in Film history? Yes, Art is subjective and to each their own but there seems to be a clear pattern in the content being made and lauded. Rahul Desai, wrote in his recent review of a web-series on FilmCompanion that “the triumph of an important story cannot be that it exists. Representation in art is a double-edged sword. It’s a good thing, of course. But because Hindi cinema hasn’t been inclusive for so long, the very prospect of representation tends to reduce the characters to their socio-cultural identity. They become little more than their conflicts and struggles.”

Similarly, choosing to make a film with/on a marginalized identity cannot be taken as anticipatory bail for its lack of quality or depth. ‘Bollywood’ has long been infamous for objectifying ‘item-songs’ and cheap humour at the cost of those who are fat or dark or gay or South-Indian. I bet that a lot of the makers of such work weren’t communal, casteist, homophobic, discriminatory people in their actual lives but they just made these stories because it was a trend, it was ‘what worked’. Well now the trend has been reversed, now it is no longer cool to ridicule someone for what is not wrong, for what is their right. But similarly, just because someone is making content where the protagonist is from a persecuted community and is being endorsed, doesn’t mean that the makers are themselves truly rational and liberal. It just means that they piggybacked on the new trend. And therefore web-series after web-series, film after film are being churned out where appearing woke is perceived as enough, as a get-out-of-jail card. And the people who’ve built careers on being the custodians of wokeness, are lauding such content.

Ask someone who has truly suffered, ask the actually persecuted, ask the humane, ask the ones who live with constant trauma, we do not want to discriminate the way we have been discriminated against, we do not want to become what we hated, we do not want to win on the same criteria where we have lost, we do not want to be held any less accountable for the quality and depth of our work, we do not want our struggles to be reduced to our names, our trauma to be reduced to an award, we do not want to be celebrated even when undeserved, we want to be gauged and judged like all others, to win on merit, to be appreciated when appreciable and criticized when found wanting, we want to live and thrive like everyone, we just want to let be.