Fighting Censorship in India
By Sarah Stähli

Rakesh Sharma is a leading Indian documentarist. His award-winning Final Solution deals with the riots against Moslems that took place in Gujarat in 2002. He participated in this year's Campus panel "Filming in the Eye of the Storm".

How does censorship work in India?

Rakesh Sharma: By law any film that has to be screened in public or sold must have clearance from the censor board. In India, the censor board is not self-regulated by the industry but run by the government. It's directly controlled by the ministry of information and broadcasting, which has the power to cut entire sequences or scenes. I am against censorship per se because what it implies is that there's a group of people — whether private, official, or governmental — who pretend to know what the rest of us should watch, and that affects our artistic freedom immensely.

You came up with a clever distribution technique named "Pirate & Circulate". What was the idea behind it?

Rakesh Sharma: When my film Final Solution was banned by the censor board, I had two choices: I could either go to court or I could fight it. Going to court is a very laborious process and can take up to three years. During those three years you're only allowed underground screenings. I decided to fight the ban on a political as well as a legal level. I said to myself, if they want to bury my film I'll make sure that my film actually gets seen by more people. With that in mind we ran many campaigns, one of them being "Pirate & Circulate": people who promised to make five copies and screen the film got a free copy from me.

You are a founding member of the Indian film festival "Vikalp". What is this festival about?

Rakesh Sharma: "Vikalp" is a group of about 250 Indian documentary filmmakers who came together to fight censorship. In 2004 the Bombay International Film Festival rejected Final Solution even before it went to the censor board. The festival also rejected several other political documentaries, even though they were not as directly political as mine, focusing rather on sexuality, gender or environmental questions. The festival committee said they were not selected because they were poor-quality films, but we knew exactly what was happening. So we formed a co-op and decided that on the same days as the main festival we would hold a "shadow" festival. We wanted the audience to evaluate the official festival and our alternative and see for themselves which films should have been selected or not. The response was tremendous. At present the "Vikalp" has several chapters throughout India. What started as a small protest became a big movement.

Does your political commitment overcome the fear of getting hurt, getting killed even, while shooting?

Rakesh Sharma: I wait for something to give me a gut feeling, and once it has a deep emotional impact on me, I have to tell it. I have to get desperate to tell a story.

When I was shooting Final Solution I realized there would be problems with the local government, because the party responsible for the violence was in power. I got arrested once or twice but released almost two hours later. I've shot a lot under difficult conditions; you develop an instinct. You understand when something's going to happen and you're constantly alert to it. If you're not afraid, people who want to frighten you get confused because they're banking on your fear.

Sarah Stähli

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