Filmmaker Shankar Borua behind the camera

The wait has been worth it. That came out triumphant after a hiatus of almost half-a-decade as the indefatigable spirit of art.

J.P. Das’s documentary film, The Green Warriors — Apatanis, is not just another documentary. It is a crusade against the common refrain that documentaries have no future.

It is not everyday that one gets to watch a documentary on the big screen. Keen film lovers, film society workers and people from the film industry braved the sultry summer heat and thronged a theatre in Guwahati to iterate the fact that they won’t let the documentary film tradition die an untimely death.

The six-decade-old Assamese film industry, which started its voyage with Joymoti by Rupkonwar Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla in the 1940s, has witnessed a boom in recent years. But there is a yawning interlude in the realm of critical documentary films.

“There’s not much of a documentary tradition in Assam. Most of it is basically propaganda documentaries of various government departments, which are both boring and misleading,” filmmaker Gautam Bora pointed out.

“These days people prefer to make documentaries in the video format rather than in the film format, which is considered more convenient. Making films in the video format is less expensive — copies can easily be made and can even be screened on the big screen,” he said.

It is not that documentary films are not made in Assam. “In fact, a small group of filmmakers brought laurels for the state after they won national awards for their outstanding work,” Chandan Sarmah, a film critic, said.

To be more precise, it was during the mid-Seventies and early Eighties that an FTII, Pune product, Dulal Saikia (Wheels and Horizon), and actor-turned-director Chandra Narayan Barua (Land Where Bamboo Blows Free) won national awards in this particular genre of cinema.

A glorious chapter for documentaries in Assam was kicked off with the Wosobipo-creator Gautam Bora’s Sons of Abotani — the Mishings, which fetched him the national award for the best documentary film in 1992.

Two years later, national award-winning musician Sher Choudhury (of Wosobipo fame) followed it up with his maiden directorial venture The Sound of Dying Colours. The tradition was kept alive by Prabin Hazarika with his first film Hastir kanya in 1996, Altaf Mazid with his Jibon in 1999 and Hemanta Das with his Drummers of Koihati in 2000.

“All the four earned national acclaim by virtue of either winning national awards or their films getting an entry in the Indian Panorama section of the international film festivals in the country,” Sarmah added.

Shankar Borua — who describes himself as “an Assamese storyteller” — entered the scene a couple of years ago with a documentary titled Angst at Large, which dwelt on the insurgency scenario in Assam. If God be with Us — another documentary made last year — looked at the 50-year-old Naga insurgency through the eyes of a sympathetic neighbour.

Recently, A River’s Story, the Quest for the Brahmaputra, a 54-minute documentary, was directed by Jahnu Barua. Moreover, documentaries are produced by the Films Division on a wide range of themes.

Doordarshan Kendra (DDK), Guwahati, produces one in-house documentary on different issues every month. “We also commission documentaries to different independent filmmakers. In the last three years, we have produced nearly 100 documentaries in the video format. Some of these have also been screened at the video film festivals in Bangkok and Mumbai,” D.K. Rabha, director, DDK, Guwahati, said.

Sarmah, however, feels that Doordarshan should allot timeslots of at least half-an-hour everyday on prime time for documentaries, even if there are no sponsors.

Of late, there has not been any serious effort by Assamese filmmakers in this direction. “In fact, it’s almost all over now mainly due to lack of institutional finance. Producers do not come forward to finance documentaries as the return is not assured. There is practically no market in India for documentary films,” filmmaker Hemanta Das, creator of the much-acclaimed documentary Koihatir Dhulia, said.

Veteran filmmaker Kulada Kumar Bhattacharyya, who has made more than 30 documentaries in the film format, said, “Filmmaking has always been an expensive business and someone has to buy it.”

Bhattacharyya was also an executive committee member of the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association and president of the Calcutta-based Short Filmmakers Association of Eastern India.

An official of the Assam Film (Finance and Development) Corporation passed the buck by saying, “We finance only feature films and not documentary films. This type of films are financed by the department of cultural affairs.” However, Pritam Saikia, director of cultural affairs, pointed out, “We have not financed documentary films for the past two to three years because of budgetary constraints.”

Filmmaker Altaf Mazid said people are simply not interested in making “other kind of films”. He said, “I do not believe in the nomenclature called documentary. A film is a film is a film. Every film tells a story, whether it’s about renewable energy, toothpaste or a sinking ship. If we start making watertight compartments, we tend to get confused.”

He added, “A documentary filmmaker is like a marginalised section, very much like a political division. However, we have to continue with the word ‘documentary’ or else we would be sucked into the realm of commercial cinema.”

On the contrary, however, Mazid felt that there is a big overseas market to be explored. His film Jibon was officially selected for various international film festivals in the country and abroad.

His next film Lakhtokiat Golam even won an award in the best director category in the Seventh Pyongyang Film Festival of Non-Aligned & Developing Countries “The Sahitya Akademi has agreed to purchase the film on an exclusive copyright basis. The deal is almost final,” Mazid said.

Interestingly, documentaries are now increasingly being recognised as a form that has the potential of inspiring debate and thought among diverse audiences. “Many documentaries reveal truths that are uncomfortable for those in power or seeking power. Therefore, given a pretext, they have no hesitation in going the whole hog to muzzle the voices of troublesome documentary filmmakers,” said another critic.

For instance, film festivals around the world screen uncensored films because they respect the right of a filmmaker to unfettered self-expression. But, Indian films that participate in the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) are subjected to censorship. These IFFI films need a censor certificate simply because eligibility for the festival hinges on a cut-off date.

“It is a selection mechanism that has been in existence ever since the inception of the Indian Panorama section in 1978 and the insistence on a censor certificate has never had anything to do with the content of a film,” Sarmah said.