MUMBAI: As the release date of the upcoming documentary 'House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths', based on the true case of 11 deaths in a Delhi family, moves closer, showrunner and co-director Leena Yadav opened up about the process of making the documentary.
In a Netflix panel discussion called Decoding Documentaries, Leena, along with makers of 'Crime Stories: India Detectives' and 'Bad Boy Billionaires', discussed the creative process of making documentaries.
Leena talked about how difficult it was to get people who were a part of the incident as part of the docu-series.
"Those were very difficult conversations, I must admit. But I will always remember a beautiful incident that happened, while we were interviewing the family members, one of them came up to me and thanked me saying that this was like therapy for him. This is when I felt as if we're doing the right thing. We covered a total of 400 hours of interviews and having those conversations were definitely difficult and emotionally draining but this has been a big learning for me," she shared.
'Bad Boy Billionaires' director Dylan Mohan Gray talked about the importance of diversity of voices in a documentary.
"So much of what we do in documentaries is about creating relationships of trust with different kinds of people. I understood the importance of diversity of voices and to allow the audience to triangulate what they feel about the story. During my research, I realized that the story is quite different from the one that was put out there, it's much more complex than that. The story is about many other things, it touched upon so many interesting aspects of Indian culture and society, this to me was very fascinating," he said.
Claire Cahill, who served as a series producer on 'Crime Stories: India Detectives', opened up about the pre-production that the docu-series required.
"'Crime Stories: India Detectives' took almost 3 years to be made. Our first trip to Bangalore was in 2018 when we started conversations with the commissioner who was very responsive about making a series that followed live investigations. These conversations progressed and we obtained all the necessary permissions over a period of 18 months, our filming period was over 5 months. The process of gaining trust and having conversations with all the necessary parties in order to cover an investigation in the way that we did involve an enormous amount of work," she shared.
'House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths' is all set to release on Netflix on October 8.