Indian filmmakers Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas discuss their festival hit Writing With Fire with acclaimed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta. The film, shortlisted for the 2022 Documentary Feature Academy Award, concerns the Indian news agency Khabar Lahariya, run by Dalit (low-caste) Chief Reporter Meera and her feisty understudy, crime reporter Suneeta.
Click here to see the whole conversation between Sushmit, Rintu and Deepa. Excerpts follow…
After a year of enormous critical acclaim for the documentary, Deepa began by asking Sushmit and Rintu about the amazing reception that the film has been receiving among audiences.
Sushmit: It´s just thrown us back, it´s been a year of virtual screenings and being back with the audience has been just spectacular, this is why we make films.
Had they finally seen it on a large screen with real people watching the film, Deepa wanted to know.
Rintu: Yes, At Tuschinski (IDFA, Amsterdam) I think it hit us the most because it was such a grand theatre and then to have Meera alongside and just absorb the standing ovation felt like this is real, and this film is talking so strongly to an audience. It was very special.
Rintu (later): The entry point was being human and being around women who were really interesting and had so many dimensions to themselves, and that´s the kind of people we enjoy spending time with. Who likes vanilla people? It´s really when you have many things in you that you´re an interesting person to hang out with, and in this case these were women who you meet on an everyday basis as friends, as colleagues, but when these women are represented on screen usually they are victims with zero agency, and in the first seven days of us spending time with them it was a moving train.
We were just like, ‘we want to do this.’…That spirit of ‘get out of my way I want to do my thing,’ is what really attracted us. The journalism is after that, the whole newspaper is after. The heart of it was really, who are these women? What is their place in the world, and how are they making sense of it for themselves and others? That´s a real space of curiosity for us generally as filmmakers and in this case it just became a journey we wanted to be a part of really.
Deepa: Did you learn anything during that journey about yourselves?
Sushmit: You learn about your privilege in life, and we both come from middle class families in India but I am a privileged upper caste Hindu man, and to be filming this story in really the Badlands, the dark corners of the country, of Uttar Pradesh, and to be able to experience the joy of being with Dalit women journalists doing what they are doing really shone a light for me.
My learning was that another world is possible, and Meera and her journalists and her band of sisters gave me hope because they are working towards another vision of what a democracy could be, could feel like, could breathe like, could look like and every day they´re chipping away at systems of patriarchy, systems of oppression which our privilege allows us to discuss in our drawing rooms with our families and with our friends. And you know what will happen to the world, there are so many cracks. I remember somebody once said “a cracked mirror reflects a thousand moons” and that´s essentially for us what this story was and we wanted to find a way to amplify it and bring it to the world.
Deepa: Did you ever disagree with each other? What did you learn about each other?
Rintu: We definitely had trigger points and I think as a couple and as director/cinematographer/editors you are constantly in different roles, yet in the same world, and then a pandemic hit and we had 24 hours of each other editing the film. As we keep saying, six years of marriage, 5 years of making this film and then a year of pandemic and we still managed this baby to go out into the world. I think our marriage will survive.
Click here to see the whole conversation between Sushmit, Rintu and Deepa.
