An article from the magazine Time Out, Mumbai
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Reel change
Revolution flows from the lens of a camera
Anand Patwardhan
Political documentary
Anand Patwardhan is a genre by himself. He is a poster boy for the anti-establishment documentary movement that started in the mid-1970s. Patwardhan is part of a generation of leftwing filmmakers that was unabashedly activist in its approach and saw the documentary as a weapon with which to correct social wrongs, especially those committed by the government. Among the issues with which such filmmakers as Patwardhan, Tapan Bose and Deepa Dhanraj dealt were indiscriminate slum demolitions, the Bhopal gas tragedy and anti-women family planning policies.
Patwardhan’s trademark style includes footage of actual events, sharp interviews with his opponents that often made them sound foolish, and cutting between seemingly unrelated footage. “I like things to reveal themselves rather than tell people what is going on, “Patwardhan said. “Many of the things that appear shocking are not so shocking for the people who believe in them. It is only when you juxtapose their views with something else that the truth comes home.”
In the early ’90s, Patwardhan collected footage of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rath Yatra. In Father Son and Holy War, he makes the link between a feeling of threatened masculinity among the majority Hindu community and its link with increased communal feelings. Patwardhan aims to provoke audiences into rethinking their support for the BJP. “This kind of filmmaking is becoming rare,” he said. “People react with surprise, not with horror.”
Source: Time Out, Mumbai