Documentaries find a space in the multiplex

Documentary filmmaking is riding an exciting wave in India by wooing multiplex audiences in unprecedented numbers

Katiyabaaz, a documentary film on power theft in Kanpur made by Fahad Mustafa and Deepti Kakkar and distributed by the Anurag Kashyap-helmed Phantom Films, opened in an unprecedented 60 screens in 12 cities and ran for two weeks. Contrast this to 2005 when India's veteran documentary filmmaker, Anand Patwardhan, released War and Peace, his take on nuclear testing in the subcontinent, in all of two screens. In November last year, Dylan Mohan Gray's Fire In The Blood, an incendiary expose of Big Pharma's role in the AIDS crisis, stayed in theatres for a record five weeks.

This year has seen the release of three documentaries in theatres: Katiyabaaz, Nishtha Jain's Gulabi Gang, which followed Bundelkhand's well-known women's self-help group, and Nisha Pahuja's The World Before Her, which sought to explore the women's movement in India. More are in the works. Upcoming documentaries in the post-production stage that are generating a palpable buzz include Driving With Selvi, a film on South India's first female taxi driver, directed by Elisa Paloschi; Placebo, a hybrid documentary by Abhay Kumar that deals with the pressures of academic excellence, which is being produced by more than 80 collaborators in association with AKFPL, a company set up by Kashyap and producer Guneet Monga; and Proposition for a Revolution, a documentary chronicling the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party, directed by Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla and produced by Anand Gandhi.

Viewers are lapping it all up. Rushing through the doors of the India International Centre to catch the closing film of Open Frame, New Delhi's biggest documentary film festival, I reach with 10 minutes to spare and only manage a lone seat in the corner first row. The next few minutes see many more people troop in and park themselves on the aisle till the auditorium is chock-full. The documentary, Being Bhaijaan, explores the impact of actor Salman Khan's screen machismo on small-town men in India. The screening ends with a rousing reception and an extended interaction with the filmmakers.

India has always had a thriving tradition of non-fiction filmmaking that is now gaining ground like never before, as young filmmakers adopt the power of the new media and aggressive marketing techniques to herald a second nouvelle vague of this particular cinematic form. Trumping the long-held notion that documentaries are educative and truthful, though unabashedly dull, the genre is undergoing several changes. One, instead of staid vox-pop formats, today's documentaries increasingly choose to be character-driven. Thus, Gulabi Gang followed the revolutionary Sampat Pal on her exploits, while Katiyabaaz rallied its narrative around protagonist Loha Singh's maverick persona. Two, documentaries today invest heavily in graphics, sound design, production and music, which makes storytelling compelling. And three, the democratisation of technology has seen a definite improvement in access as well as production values.

Still, it's not easy to raise money for a documentary film. Financiers, perhaps because of the uptake in mainstream cinema, are still not ready to back documentaries. Studios are playing it safe: they are opening up to investing in the distribution and promotion of a near-finished product that shows potential but are wary of investing in an idea at the production stage. Ranjan Singh, producer and head of marketing at Phantom Films, hopes that by promoting films such as Katiyabaaz, the production house will be able to "contribute to the building of a sustainable culture for good content, irrespective of form."

In the West, such films attract the philanthropy of many passionate individuals and organisations. Thus, many feature-length documentaries - Katiyabaaz and Proposition For A Revolution, to name only two - are now funded by grants and investors outside India: The Sundance Institute and Documentary Fund (awarding grants of up to $50,000), Cinereach, (awarding grants in the range of $5,000-50,000), Asian Network of Documentary (up to $10,000) and others. In India, there is the India Foundation for Arts and the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, but the sums they provide are paltry at best: between Rs 4 lakh and Rs 10 lakh, on an average. Moreover, the Public Service Broadcasting Trust holds the primary rights for the film, leading filmmakers to either pursue grants from abroad or resort to crowdfunding so that they can retain ownership of their film. Pahuja relied on crowdfunding of Rs 31 lakh to release The World Before Her in India, while Shukla and Ranka got over Rs 15 lakh for the post-production of Proposition for a Revolution.

Do they make money? Mustafa and Gray say they recovered their costs. Since both their films were produced by raising money from either grants or privately, all they had to account for was the money used in post-production work and distribution. The good news is that there is a steadily rising demand for high-quality documentary films. The wave is not just limited to Tier-1 or -Tier 2 cities - it manages to penetrate far beyond. Thus, 600 came to watch a screening of Katiyabaaz in Patna, while 1,200 turned up in Allahabad. There are now annual documentary film festivals in Gorakhpur and Dharamshala that are purportedly the highlight of the towns' cultural calendar.

Sanjay Kak, the firebrand filmmaker of pathbreaking documentaries such as Jashn-e-Azadi and Red Ant Dream, says documentaries now have a substantial following and that's why commercial distributors are toying with the idea of releasing them. "They want to keep an eye on it, just in case there is a commercial possibility, they don't want to miss that opportunity." PVR's Director's Rare, the limited release arm of PVR that works as a springboard to support the theatrical release of niche content from across the world, is the only mainstream stage for alternative cinema in India, with a presence in 43 cities. Shiladitya Bora, its programming head, attributes its existence to "a paradigm shift from star-driven cinema to content-driven cinema."

Convincing people to watch a film on a social issue on a weekend and shell out Rs 300 for it remains a daunting task. In such a scenario, Kak, the wizened veteran, cautions that theatres make space for only a certain kind of documentary film: "Films that are character-driven, with a clearly discernible narrative arc, and. if possible, give us redemption!" Mustafa, Katiyabaaz's director, had this kind of viability in mind for his film, and therefore he and his co-director, Kakkar, always knew they had to take the film to a wider audience. "It'll only make sense if it has an impact and creates a dialogue between the people that are the primary concern of this film, placing a high degree of focus to the narrative structure and music," he says.

Increasingly, the production values of documentaries are coming up to par with fiction features. Sneha Khanwalkar, the young musician behind the hit soundtracks of Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and Gangs of Wasseypur, also lent her skills to an immensely catchy score for Faiza Ahmed Khan's Supermen of Malegaon. Namrata Rao, the National Award-winning editor for films such as Kahaani and Jab Tak Hai Jaan, came on board to help edit the 250 hours of footage for Katiyabaaz, while fusion band Indian Ocean provided the music for the film. Anand Gandhi, the director of Kiran Rao-backed Ship of Theseus, distributed Gulabi Gang.

These filmmakers have also realised that some hype always comes in handy. The route to promotion used by mainstream films can be very expensive. So they take their films to the international festivals.

The World Before Her was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding coverage of a current news story in 2014, and also won the award for best documentary feature at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. Fire In The Blood was nominated for the grand jury prize at Sundance Film Festival and won the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung prize for political film at Filmfest Hamburg in 2013. Supermen Of Malegaon won the Golden Camera award for best documentary at the US International Film and Video Festival.

That helps create a buzz. Those who can afford it, pack in more marketing punch. Katiyabaaz, for instance, was marketed just as any other traditional film, complete with a power-packed trailer, a music video featuring Indian Ocean musicians Rahul Ram and Amit Kilam, an exclusive premiere, a Google hangout, a live Facebook chat, et cetera. Pahuja, whose The World Before Her has been the most successful documentary film at the box office yet, gives credit to its strong and targeted social media campaign "which was personal, engaged and really spoke to audiences. We weren't just interested in getting a film out - we were interested in having it spark a discussion."

There's an obvious flipside to this trend. Patwardhan, who has dabbled in various distribution models himself, is of the view that a commercial release is hardly the cherished dream of Indian documentary filmmakers. "Distributors pass on all real costs, like digital encoding, to the filmmaker, taking no risk themselves. They also do minimal, if any, publicity. So filmmakers release commercially only for the pleasure of showing their films. A viable commercial release of documentaries is still an idea waiting to happen." While the box-office collections of documentaries are yet to total up to any significant number, the buzz created during the theatrical release of the documentaries helps in selling other secondary rights of the film. Additional revenue from home video, television, digital and video-on-demand rights then becomes a possibility.

There is also a growing perception that neither our mainstream fiction films nor broadcast journalism is engaging with the complex social realities on the ground, which is why the independent genre of both fiction and documentary is increasingly coming to the fore to provide nuanced insights. "What we need is the right kind of documentary, and now it's only a matter of time till it comes out," Gandhi says, predicting the kind of film that will be able to pump up the fervent public support the kind Academy award winning filmmaker Michael Moore enjoys globally, churning out 'blockbuster documentaries' such as Roger And Me and Sicko like nobody's business. For instance, Fahrenheit 9/11 holds the record for the world's top-grossing documentary, raking in $200 million at the box office. Fire In The Blood's Gray adds: "I think a lot of emerging filmmakers are recognising that they can often make far more exciting films in the non-fiction space, and that they can garner a great deal of attention and acclaim by doing so in India and beyond. Certainly no country has more interesting stories to tell than India."

So, is the golden age of documentaries finally here? Shabani Hassanwalia, the co-director of Being Bhaijaan, shares that while she has received accolades for the work she does, as a documentary filmmaker, she is still asked: When are you going to make a real film? For the new-age cine-goer who loathes having her intelligence repeatedly insulted by generic masala film tropes, one can dare go so far as to say that this is as real as it gets.