How many ways can you frame a documentary about journalism? One way is by privileging journalists as subjects in the narrative: put them on a pedestal and show them fighting the good fight and uncovering uncomfortable truths. This is the approach taken by Fanatics: The Deep End (2021), that follows VICE News correspondent Alice Hines as she immerses herself in niche subcultures – from Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol to people who are obsessed with gun culture.
Another interesting approach is when the documentarian turns the camera toward themselves: they become both the subject and the object of the story, a ‘citizen journalist’ of sorts. This kind of approach, when handled by a master filmmaker at ease with their craft, can lend a humanism and kindness to the narrative, even if the story itself is full of unfairness. This brings about a film like Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film (2010), where Panahi documents the threats against him by the Iranian government in the form of a video diary through his phone.
What about a third, interesting way? In a market that appears oversaturated with true crime series, investigative journalism stories and ‘talking heads’ style infodumps, is there space for the journo movie template to truly reinvent itself and offer us something new? This is where Writing With Fire (2021) comes in.
Directed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, Writing With Fire became the first Indian film ever to be shortlisted as a nominee for Best Documentary Feature at the 2022 Academy Awards, that too without a US distributor or streaming partner. It helped put Indian documentary films on the world map, with another Indian documentary, The Elephant Whisperers, finally crossing the hurdle and winning an Academy Award this year in the Best Documentary Shorts category.
The film charts the progress of ‘Khabar Lahariya’, the only grassroots-based, all-female-led news organisation in India, as it transitions from a primarily print-first media publication to a more digital-first approach. The film begins in 2016, when the organisation has just started a YouTube channel, and the structure of the film takes us through the channel’s digital growth from 10,000 views to 10 million views. We follow the stories of three different women from the organisation – Meera (the Chief Reporter) and her two other reporter colleagues, Suneeta and Skyamkali.
The uniqueness of Khabar Lahariya as a media organisation is that its success is due to the coming together of women from different social strata across India, whether they are Dalits, Muslims, OBCs or other upper-caste women. As Meera, the organisation’s Chief Reporter (from a Dalit background) says, “In our region, a journalist meant you are an upper-caste man. A Dalit woman journalist was unthinkable.” This, despite Meera possessing a Masters in Political Science.
And this is where Writing With Fire sets itself apart. Journalism here isn’t some kind of sanctimonious profession and the women who are part of the collective aren’t in it to pursue lofty ideals of Truth and the Public Interest. For these women, journalism and the job of being a journalist is a question of respect. Through their work, they’re able to earn a level of respect in a society that treats them with utter contempt due to their lowly caste, religion or second-class status as a woman. Journalism is nothing more than a job, and through this, the women in the collective are able to exercise some agency in their lives and gain some much-needed financial independence.
The challenges that the women face in transitioning to a digital-led organisation from a print-led publication are also markedly different to the ones faced by journalists in privileged, first-world newsrooms. For example, one of the reporters Shyamkali, struggles with filing her stories online because the keyboards on the phone are in English, and she is unable to phonetically co-relate the letters of the English alphabet to the ones laid out in the QWERTY format on the keyboard. The film also succeeds in explaining a lot of journalism lingo and jargon such as the meaning of an ‘angle’, an ‘insert’, a ‘piece-to-camera’ etc, without having to rely on exposition or an info dump.
One might think that the film is leaning towards becoming a hagiography of Khabar Lahariya as an organisation, but this isn’t the case. Throughout the film, the women make mistakes as journos that may be used as examples of what not to do in a Media Studies 101 class. One of the more glaring examples of this is how reporter Suneeta decides top graphically document a story involving the violent death of a young woman that probably should’ve been censored. The presence of these ‘mistakes’ by the Lahariya collective helps ground the film; the main protagonists aren’t morally infallible, they mess up much like you and I.
Back in March 2022, when the film was shortlisted as a nominee at the Academy Awards, the organisation issued a statement where it outlined how the film presents a rather simplistic version of a more complex story. The statement took particular issue with the fact that the film places a lopsided emphasis on Lahariya locking horns with the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP)-led Hindu right-wing government in Uttar Pradesh, when in reality, the collective has held whichever party was in power accountable right from the beginning, way back from its inception in 2002.
Lahariya is a grassroots organisation that’s functioned for a considerable period without being in the spotlight in a country where press freedom is under threat. The latest Press Freedom Index, prepared by Reporters Without Borders, placed India at 161 out of 180 countries, its lowest position ever. Just recently, the Indian government banned the BBC documentary, India: The Modi Question, that’s critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the grounds that it’s a “propaganda piece”. As Meera herself puts it in the film, “If we are simply critical of this Government, we can be attacked by anyone, at any time. So, only a select group of reporters will work on such sensitive stories.”
The current ruling party is notorious for controlling news media, and for targeting journalists, among scores of other professions, amplifying the danger for those who choose to dissent in today’s India. On 4th May 2020, one of Khabar Lahariya’s own young female journalists was found dead under unspecified circumstances. The existence of a film like Writing With Fire reminds us that continued navel gazing about the future of journalists and journalism is limited to privileged newsrooms and editorial desks in the western world. For many journalists in other parts of the world, the choice to publish or not to publish can be the difference between life or death.
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Writing With Fire
