Documentary as a form of Dissidence

The moving image is innately a medium in flux, shaped, moulded, perceived, and repurposed constantly through a plurality of voices and gazes. How does the image “open” itself out to the world at its seams, and how do feminist standpoints create an alternate mode of narration that deviates from the pre-existing authoritative documentary form? The heterodox modalities of praxis that feminist standpoints foster, and the resilience of the voices that assemble to frame what Lalitha Gopalan calls the new wave of feminist political filmmaking in Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (2002), ran across the two days as an active undercurrent.

What does the act of dissidence mean in the present moment, and whose voices of dissent are curtailed and obscured? Moreover, what governs that decision-making? The programme, through its screenings and discussions, drew largely on Pooja Rangan’s theory of counterforensic listening (2025), a self-reflexive mode of perception that redirects the cinematic “I” towards what eludes conventional listening. Pauses, silences, ruptures and abrasions reveal more than what meets the bare eye and alert the conditioned ear, prompting the audience to redefine solidarity as a verb: an embodied act of knowing, witnessing and listening.

Screened on day one, titled Dissident Pasts, Dhanraj’s Kya Hua Is Sheher Ko? (1986) was a prophetic exploration of the communal violence between Hindus and Muslims in 1984 in Hyderabad, exposing the inflammatory fundamentalist ideology that would dominate the years to come. A common thread running through the films was the filmmaker’s conscious insertion of their auteurial presence, deliberately made visible. The interviews and off-camera commentary followed the eye of the camera through the ruined streets, destroyed homes and deserted cities, reinstating the presence of the filmmaker as an observant and participatory entity. In the others, it appears through the filmmaker’s own childhood photographs, drawn from the family collection and juxtaposed within the narrative landscape. Navroze Contractor’s guerrilla-style camerawork, conveyed through camera blackouts and shaky takes, records a religious procession turned violent and public inflammatory hate speeches. 

Madhusree Dutta’s I Live in Behrampada (1993) untangled the complexities of the outsider’s gaze, as it shifted from the towering overbridge where the filmmaker first encountered the urban settlement, to the gullies and congested quarters of Bombay’s Muslim-inhabited slum colony of the lived-in Behrampada. All cities rise from marsh and collapse into dust, and Behrampada's trajectory, as the film traces, is no different. Its earliest settlers — three women and two buffaloes who transformed the marshland into a concrete, livable space — are now declared outcasts and interlopers by the neighbouring residents.  

This reversal provokes the question of abidance and domicile. Who is considered a resident, and what determines ownership over land? Obligatory paperwork? Labour? A sense of belonging nurtured through sustained engagement? Moving further, what is it that nullifies the legitimacy of Behrampada’s earliest inhabitants, restricting their own claim to the land even as their labour extended its ground to others? 

How are identity and citizenship claims negotiated in these cities fraught with contradictions? Questions from the audience returned to how a city is perceived, and what it means to confront a city in its state of strange(r)liness. Native to Hyderabad, Dhanraj reflected on Hyderabad Ekta’s contribution to the making of her film, which she believed was nothing less than a “forensic autopsy of a riot” in progress. Madhusree, on the other hand, spoke candidly of “zamana,” or time, as both an erosive and a generative force behind the making of hers, calling the process a “masterclass” in itself. The conversation also turned to the afterlife of the documentary form: how a film’s material corpus routinely outlives its original purpose through contextomy. It then assumes a parallel life, circulated through many modes of viewership, translations in media, and repurposing. 

Day two, titled Dissident Futures, invited filmmakers Jyoti Nisha and Nausheen Khan to showcase their films Dr B R Ambedkar: Now and Then (2023) and Land of My Dreams (2023). Drawing on Dr B R Ambedkar’s critique of caste, Nisha explored the correlations between caste and its erasure in popular culture discourses. She reflected on Bell Hooks’ theorisation of the oppositional gaze through the critical framework of the Bahujan spectatorship, consciously and pertinently pushing back the upper-caste-dominated lens. The artistic decision to appear before the camera, to claim one’s lived truth and to narrate the personal into the larger public discourse reasserts the claim of the personal to exist in tandem with the political. 

Individual identity is shaped collectively by decades of gendered and caste-based violence, and the act of resistance often arises as fluidly as the desire to refute inertness, to disavow silence and initiate complex conversations. The film follows a multimedia approach, blending animated comic-strip-inspired illustrations with archival public footage. Linking mythological allusions like Ekalavya’s inequitable penance to the searing institutional murder of Rohith Vemula at present, Nisha’s direction traces temporal timelines as a meandering form, leaving behind residues that accumulate and resist dissolution. An exposure to these everyday brutalities also brings to realisation how they shape the urban landscapes. 

The perilous conditions of persecution inflicted on marginalised communities, especially under the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), were explored through Nausheen’s work. A plurality of voices, from the protest and sit-in sites of Shaheen Bagh, Jantar Mantar, Seelampur, and Red Fort, dominated the landscape. Nausheen ruminated over estrangement and strained interpersonal connections due to political indifference, and her potential as a documentary filmmaker to act as a “bridge” between the women of Shaheen Bagh and the cocooned, detached spectator to elicit empathy. Whether the moving image can generate relatability and urge its viewers to renegotiate their belief systems was a question that the programme grappled with. 

The closing discussion convened by Zaidi raised three central questions. First, Zaidi cautioned against the reflexive use of “tapestry” as an overarching linguistic category reserved for women’s work, which carried built-in connotations of the frail, fragile, and vulnerable. Second, the dubbing and flattening of caste into class and its gradual erasure within mainstream academia and popular culture was questioned. Third, the integration of pedagogy into the practice of filmmaking was discussed in relation to learning and unlearning. The filmmakers’ own recollections of the practical and logistical challenges, such as the lack of funds, censorship, and the search for temporary accommodation, further established that they too are fugitives suspended in the precarious realities that continue to shape the lives on screen and extend beyond it. The programme ended on a contemplative note, questioning if filmmaking as a radical tool can foresee a future rooted in hope and shared solidarities. 

REFERENCES:

1. Gopalan, L. (2002). Cinema of interruptions: Action genres in contemporary Indian cinema. British Film Institute. 

2. Hooks, B. (1992). The oppositional gaze: Black female spectators. In Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press. 

3. Rangan, P. (2025). The documentary audit: Listening and the limits of accountability. Columbia University Press. 

4. Stein, E. (1989). On the problem of empathy (W. Stein, Trans.). ICS Publications. (Original work published 1917)