There’s a lot of cake-cutting in director Vinay Shukla’s documentary While We Watched, which follows veteran journalist Ravish Kumar as he navigates the Indian political and media landscape. Each time a cake appears, it marks an NDTV employee quitting the pioneering independent news company or moving on to better prospects, another loss in an already-grieving organisation.“It was one of those weird rituals of adulthood [where] everyone was pretending to be happy, but it was underpinned by tragedy,” said director Shukla, for whom those were some of the hardest moments of the documentary to shoot.. “People who had worked in the industry for 20-25 years were suddenly leaving. It was a great reckoning for them — learning something, practicing something, mastering something, and then having to start afresh.” There’s a lot of cake in Shukla’s documentary. And a whole lot of sadness.
While We Watched tracks NDTV editor and veteran journalist Ravish Kumar as he attempts to remain a voice of reason amidst the chaos within and outside his organisation — a high turnover rate, dwindling funds, shrinking viewership, increasing misinformation, abusive and hateful messages from groups opposed to his reportage. It comes at a time when India ranks 150 out of the 180 countries and territories assessed by the Reporters Without Borders’ 2022 World Press Freedom Index (eight places down from 2021). Alongside rising distrust of mainstream media are the dangers that surround reportage of current affairs in the country — numerous journalists, like Siddique Kappan and Mohammed Zubair, have been arrested on questionable charges and 41 Indian journalists have been killed over the past decade, according to New York-based non-profit organisation Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Shukla began turning the idea for the documentary around in his mind soon after he’d finished co-directing An Insignificant Man (2016) with Khushboo Ranka, a co-producer on this documentary. A longtime fan of newsroom dramas like Spotlight (2015), Collective (2019), The Newsroom (2012-2014) and Nightcrawler (2014), it struck him that real-life news channels rarely lived up to their reel depictions. “My friends were telling me that the news was driving them insane. It was doing more of a disservice than a service to my consciousness and my conscience,” he said.
He began to wonder if the people who reported the news felt the same kind of unrest that he did while watching it. The answer arrived in the form of NDTV’s Ravish Kumar, whose broadcasts led Shukla to believe the anchor was going through a vulnerable phase of his own, introspecting on his own future and purpose. Though he wasn’t sure there was enough material to sustain a documentary or if there was even a story there, he approached Kumar and asked if he could follow him around with a camera for a few days. The anchor, who was facing security concerns amid a slew of death threats at that point, responded: “As long as you don’t mind my bodyguard, I don’t mind you.” Shukla arrived with his camera the next day and immediately knew there was a story here. “I was shooting inside the NDTV newsroom and I saw a cake being cut. The air was extremely rife with tension, sadness and melancholy. I knew I had to film this,” he said.
An Insignificant Man and While We Watched form striking companion pieces, presenting markedly different snapshots of the changing political landscape and the public response to it. An Insignificant Man follows the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party and its leader Arvind Kejriwal, now the chief minister of Delhi. While We Watched chronicles the slow descent of a panicked newsroom amid budget cuts and censorship. If An Insignificant Man represented the optimism of a man attempting to change the system, While We Watched reflects the despair of someone trapped inside it. In one, the ‘insignificant man’ tag is self-bestowed, a marker of modesty. In the other, it’s an uncomfortable truth of a man questioning his relevancy.
“He’s questioning the system around him,” said Shukla. “Does this system even want him anymore? It’s not just the news industry he’s questioning, it’s also the audience. My last film was hopeful, but that hope didn’t come cheap. This film is about the cost of hope.”
The documentary is rooted in the current political scenario, touching upon the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment, hatred for Pakistan, the assassination attempt on Umar Khalid, but Shukla is convinced its broader themes are universal enough to translate without context. When the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it went on to win the Amplify Voices Award, a sequence about reportings on beef-related lynchings didn’t explain (for the benefit of predominantly White audiences) why the cow was important to Indian culture in the first place.
“There are a fair amount of things in the film that the average White audience may miss,” Shukla said. “But I'll be honest with you, I watch American films all the time, I don't know what the culture in Daytona is. But they don’t care that I don’t understand it, so why should I care if they understand it? This idea that the audience should have complete comprehension of everything that they’re watching is false. We must also make our own conclusions.” He cited the Capitol Hill riots and anti-vaxxer rhetoric during the pandemic as examples of how disinformation contributes to an eroding social fabric worldwide.
The documentary is peppered with moments of quiet. A brief shot of a reporter sitting on the floor and engaging in a series of breathing exercises conveys the immense pressure of a newsroom and the ways of coping that employees turn to. It took Shukla a while to build the kind of trust with the team that would allow him to capture them in situations of stress and worry. “Everybody who works in a newsroom is aware of the power of the camera. So I had to build my relationships slowly, get them to understand that I was not looking for some sort of major scoop that could be pro or against someone. I was looking to understand their processes and understand them as people. I was very happily looking to spend a lot of time with them,” he said. Trust grew slowly, “like a virus” with the camera team careful not to come off as intrusive.
For two years, Shukla and his camera headed to Kumar’s house by midday and spent the next 10 to 11 hours with him, in Kumar’s car as he was driving to work; at the office, during his broadcast and then back at his house. They took detailed notes about what happened each day on the drive back from his home. Once the shoot ended, Shukla and his team compared the notes they had taken during filming to common film tropes and film structures to whip the raw material into shape. Scenes were selected on the basis of what they revealed about the character and how they advanced the story. “A whole lot of time was spent on structuring and trying to figure out how to make cinema out of life,” he said. Shukla’s strategy was to create a persistent mood within the film. While We Watched is immersive, persistently sticking with the NDTV crew without breaking away to feature talking heads or voiceovers, elements common in other documentaries.
Several moments in the film capture Kumar at his most harried, fingers repeatedly running through his hair like a nervous tic, brow furrowed. “We kept waiting for moments in which he revealed himself in a manner that he doesn’t on his broadcast. We tried to capture his process, how he makes his news, what is influencing him, what is it that he’s stressed about, where is it that he’s making mistakes, what his biases are, what his shortcomings are,” said Shukla. Moments in which Kumar is playing with his young daughter at home are endearing and provide brief moments of levity, but if he comes across as a singularly harried character otherwise, it’s only because certain concessions had to be made at the edit stage. Shukla estimates that 99.99% of what he shot had to be left out of the documentary, including the anchor’s more whimsical side.
Despite pointed political references in both An Insignificant Man, in which Kejriwal’s biggest opponent is Delhi’s longest-serving chief minister Sheila Dixit, and While We Watched, Shukla insisted his works are neither pro nor anti any single party. “If we start understanding our stories purely from the perspective of who the antagonist is, I think it does a disservice to the character and the times that we are living in,” he said.
“While doing press for An Insignificant Man, at no point was I like, ‘I want you to understand that Sheila Dikshit is a problem.’ I kept saying that this is a film about political systems. What happens when a new political player tries to enter politics? What are the challenges that he or she faces? While We Watched is about what happens when you’re working against the mainstream. It’s a meditation on despair.”
While this has been an incredible year for Indian documentaries, it’s been an incredible year for Indian documentaries abroad, an important distinction. Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes became the first Indian film to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh's Writing With Fire won the Audience Award and the Special Jury Award: Impact for Change at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival before it went on to become the first-ever Indian title to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Last year, Payal Kapadia's A Night of Knowing Nothing premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Oeil d'or award for the Best Documentary. Each of these documentaries cover critical moments during the BJP government’s tenure. None of them have screened here yet.
Despite this, Shukla is confident of releasing While We Watched in India. Perhaps some of his optimism comes from his experience with An Insignificant Man, which went on to become one of India’s most successful documentaries. Not only did it release theatrically, but the film also ran for eight weeks. However, this came at the end of a prolonged battle with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which initially denied An Insignificant Man a release and then demanded major edits, including the removal of references to major political parties (Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party). Ultimately, the film was cleared by the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal and released without cuts.
“Until and unless we make our journalists better, we cannot make our journalism better. I don't think that people across the political and news spectrum will disagree that our news needs to be better rendered,” Shukla said. “I’m an optimistic person in general. I believe somewhere that we are all working and building towards a better world.”
This is an outlook Shukla is carrying with him into his next project, a hostage drama. “I’ve made two films that have been very serious, and where I was like: I must make a very serious point about systems with these films. Now I’m having fun,” he said.