Hyderabad-based filmmaker Anshul Sinha was in Bengaluru to screen his latest feature film – Mitti: Back to the Roots . The film addresses the issues of farmers’ suicide. “Though the film is made like a full-length feature film, we did not find any distributors. We did not want the film to be released on YouTube yet, so we started travelling across the country to screen it at educational and urban centres and rural areas for the benefit of farmers,” says Anshul, who started making films in 2011 and has made 41 films on varying subjects till date – most of them addressing various social issues.
But Mitti... is a different story altogether, says the man, who reveals that he visited around 250 villages and interacted with farmers there. “We also researched for eight months on their hardships.” That is not all, Anshul and his team even went on to try farming themselves to understand first-hand what a farmer goes through. “What we discovered was that their life is loaded with hardships. The input is more but output is poor. It is a life of constant struggle,” adds Anshul.
Mitti ..., he says is a crowd-funded film, and the research was spearheaded by GV Ramanjaru. The team practically learnt agricultural science so that they could write the script from a farmer’s view. “We did cotton and tomato farming. We also went to cotton markets and studied how land grabbing affects a farmer’s life. Doing farming ourselves was a tough task. We personally interacted with the families of farmers that had committed suicide.”
The filmmaker adds that the film is not a documentary, but is a “result of more than a year’s research on 25 major issues including the farming crisis, farmer suicides, pesticide poisoning, land grabbing among others.”
He explains that Mitti ... addresses the topic of why the situation of farmers in India has not changed much even 100 years after the first farmers’ movement in India at Champaran started by Mahatma Gandhi, how untested technology is thrust on us in the name of modernisation and why farmers are taking their lives.
The film is a “docudrama, based on several real life incidences from across the country. Though originally made in Hindi, we plan to dub the film in other languages to reach out to more people.”
Mitti... revolves around a young agricultural scientist, Ekta, who tries to understand the crisis in the farming sector and explores alternative paths. This is story of a village which is put up for sale and about farmers who lost their lives chasing dreams of big yields.
It is the story of young women who try to restore their livelihoods, explains Anshul.
“The film aims at saving every farmer from giving up farming and their life and making others realise what is wrong with our approach to farming today and what are the possible ways out,” assures Anshul, who is currently touring the US with his team screening Mitti...
The cast includes Subhash Gupta, Anumeha Rai, Sandeep Yadav, Sakshi Malhotra, Sanskriti Sharma, Satyaveni, HarishchandraRayala, Abhinay Shukla, Puspesh Pant and Ankitasongara.
If you want to invite the team of Mitti... to screen their film you can contact filmmakeranshulsinha@gmail.com.
