Exclusive | Director Kinshuk Surjan on Marching in The Dark premiering at MAMI

Kinshuk Surjan’s Marching in the Dark- a moving documentary that traces the lives of farmer widows in rural Maharashtra- premiered at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival on Monday. Ahead of the premiere- which is also the first time that the film will be seen in India, director Kinshuk Surjan sat down for an exclusive chat with Hindustan Times on the journey so far; from where the idea of the film took off and how the focus landed on the story of these women and their unwavering resilience. Excerpts. (Also read: Marching in the Dark review: Compelling doc sheds light on Indian farmer widows)
It is the most joyous moment to get back the film in India, to be shown the film especially in Marathi. Because there are many nuances of the humour, of the poetry that cannot be translated by subtitles. Secondly, the impact. A few days ago, my uncle watched the film online. Then he wanted to reach out to the women and do something… that is the kind of response when it goes beyond a film… one feels very (pause) satiated and purposeful. That is why we have made the film, the film is way more than just a narrative. I really want to see if something can happen later. When people actually want to reach out, it is really nice. That is what I am hoping for.
Sanjeevani has already seen the film, she was there at CPH: DOCX and Leuven. Sanjeevani had never seen a film in a theatre before. So she said that her first time watching a film was her own film.
More people associated with the film will see it now because I could not show it to all the protagonists so I will reach out to all of them and at the second screening many will be there. I am also taking the film around 20 villages with the NGO I am associated with.
How far can I go back? (smiles) That is the question. It is a deeply personal space because my grandfather was also a farmer and the other side of my family are journalists, who were associated with a newspaper called Deshbandhu. So in that sense there is a political consciousness and it also personal. In 2013, I made a film called Pola, got the National Student Award, then when again the farmers march happened in 2018, it was like a first spark so to say. That one cannot be pessimistic anymore. Once you feel some sense of hope it begins from that point.
The title was already there, and gained another meaning when I met women who deal with so much uncertainty, grief and loss. Jo reh jata hain, woh kaun sehta hain aage (The things that still remain, who will face them ahead)? The darkness gains another meaning of uncertainty, grief, loss, of not knowing what is next but you are marching through it.
So it started from there and then, marching always has a sense of hope in it. A march is always a dynamic process, a collective force. So all of these things came into this.
The idea came about when I was meeting- on one side women, who had suffered through extreme loss and grief. Their eyes dried out by crying for so many days. Even filming them felt criminal and on the other hand, I have also met extremely resilient women who, with time, have healed and learnt to navigate the social challenges of ostracization and have rebuild their lives from scratch. Sometimes even paying back the loans of their husbands, taking care of children, working in farms, diversifying into other fields. They have been able to sustain not only themselves but also take care of neighbours. The same happened with Sanjeevani when she was called by her neighbours to see this woman who had stopped eating. The one who has gone through it knows what it feels like.
So the idea came about in the line that why is there not a space for fostering friendships? Because they want to do it for each other. There is a word in English- conscientiousness, that there is a sense of duty for the other. That was a real impulse, and so we discussed it with Dr. Poddar and the NGO, and took it forward. That is how it started working. I also saw Sanjeevani transforming so it was important to have her life included as well.
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The idea of the film started from a very ideological perspective of making a film on farmer suicides around men. The focus was on the men because that is the number of suicides that one sees. The focus was to kind of find somebody who is going through all these crises… and how there are so many like them, like these numbers do not have faces.
Slowly what happened was that I found hope as I stared meeting the women in the community. Their grief and anger manifested in a way that was never about how men deal with it differently. It started from there and I slowly realized that the ones who stay are also going through so much. I learnt about grief as I learnt about them. I had not faced such grief before in my life. I had not known what grief does to you, how one goes through it for years and parallely, I also lost my aunt. In that time I supported my mother and learnt it in the same way with how these women were supporting each other.
Sanjeevani says that when you are there for someone else’s grief your own grief becomes smaller. The film took its own shape because the idea was to only be based inside the room as a safe space. Then we saw Sanjeevani evolving, and her story was so gorgeous. Then there was Sanjeevani and Parimala Tai who were visiting other houses… that was also so powerful. The film came out to be a 6 hour-cut. My editor (Joëlle Alexis) could manage it to bring it down to 105 minutes.
Pedro Costa really inspires me. Then there is Abbas Kiarostami, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. I come from the fiction school, and like the spontaneity and what I cannot write on paper or what I cannot imagine that comes through documentary. Yet, the discipline of fiction, what a frame is- how that is given so much importance… The documentary fascinates me because there are real relationships that are formed. The people who I have worked with are family members now. Parimala Tai, Sanjeevani, her kids, Parvati… they are all going to stay very close to me.