Marching in the Dark, Kinshuk Surjan’s moving and inspiring documentary on the widows of farmers who died by suicide in Maharashtra, won accolades in several film festivals across the world. While focused on one of the young widows, Sanjeevani, it’s about a group of rural women discovering inner strength, and 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 the late Lalit Surjan, editor-in-chief of a prominent news daily.
He spoke to CE about his long journey into researching and shooting the film, 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 my heart for the fields and farming. But that aside, there was this farmer’s 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.
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. In the beginning, I didn’t know if I was even ready for the film. 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 are too many suicides around.
I kept going around 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. People do tell their stories, but should you just point the camera at their faces? How do you deal with memory? How do you deal with grief? That was the most challenging aspect—not knowing how to shoot and how to find hope.
You have got great access to people like Sanjeevani. How did you manage that? And how did you define your own gaze on them…
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. As artists, we have followed a Griersonian model (based on Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson) where the exposition is way more important than the form.
But I hope the form and gaze will bring you closer to the person and see it as a story. In many contemporary documentaries, the gaze is either all about the camera looking down on the subject, or it’s like they didn’t have time to sit down with the person.
Sometimes it’s so idealised and romanticised. 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 their stories. 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.
Through an NGO, I found Dr Poddar. He started talking to the women about depression, and its signs. And, in a naive fashion, not knowing what would come out of it, we started filming. So, we came together in a sort of a collective. The film is born out of a huge social engagement. 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. 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. That gave a reason and a purpose to continue. It then transformed from just talking about depression.
Was any of it scripted?
Yes, but it was done together with Sanjeevani. How she came into the family and how she got a job during COVID, 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, Vittorio DeSica, and Satyajit Ray did it.
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. Scripted is a word looked down upon. But yes, we did it together. We planned them, we reenacted them.
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, and stands her ground. Everybody wanted to talk to her, and she was just calmly answering.