“I am ready to fight censorship as long as what I’m doing is constitutional. What will they do? Let them do what they want,”  said Anand Patwardhan, a documentary filmmaker whose work regularly speaks truth to power, responding to one of the students asking how he could still be so calm in the face of danger. He continued, “You cannot live in fear, it is a horrible way to live.” 

 

It is a rare occurrence that a film can change your outlook by three sixty degrees. It is quite an experience to be completely disturbed by what you are seeing and be shaken by it after it is done. This is what happened to me when I watched ‘Reason’ by Anand Patwardhan which draws lines between the assassination of Narendra Dabholkar and the death by suicide of Rohith Vemula.

 

Before he came to SCM for an interactive session with the students, we were shown two of his documentaries, ‘Ram ke Naam’ and ‘Reason’. While I liked both of them, the latter stayed with me. After days it was still on my mind. It made me question how I perceive certain religions and their followers, how society perceives terrorism, my own biases, and the truth that lived comfortably in my mind. 

 

So, getting to meet him a few days after the screening when the thoughts were still fresh was quite a boon. Being a big fan of fiction films, documentaries were something I did not pay much attention to but after watching this one, it became one of my favorite movies. 

 

One of the things that fascinated me about this documentary was it was almost 4 hours long and yet it was not jarring when it jumped from one topic to another, something that has often bothered me while watching movies or documentaries. 

 

So I asked Mr. Patwardhan how he managed to string the story together when there were so many different angles and characters to think of. He said that he does not write a script for his story before going to shoot. He has an idea of what he wants when he goes out and tries to find the truth behind it all. 

 

“An interview is not the basis of the film but the means to tell it,” he says when talking about his approach to an interview. Structuring, interviewing, challenging the status quo, editing a documentary, etc.—Patwardhan touched upon so many things which helped us while we were shooting our own documentary feature in Pune for an NGO called MelJol.