Kushboo Ranka, director of Insignificant Man , a film on Aam Aadmi Party leader Aravind Kejriwal, says her movie is significant in the present polarised political context in the country.
She was talking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the ViBGYOR Documentary and Short Film Festival here on Saturday. The film made by Ranka along with Vinay Shukla narrates the rise of a populist outsider as a maverick politician with a ‘combating-corruption’ agenda and how he challenged the entrenched political elites.
“We started shooting the film by end of 2012, soon after the AAP was formed. We witnessed how idealism conflicted with politics. How compromises have been made. How somebody who tries to do right things faces challenges and complications. These are things we shoot in the films. However, we refrained from making absolute statements,” Ranka says.
“The AAP talked about transparency and decentralisation in politics, which is still relevant and important. Relevance of the film is relevance of these ideas, which will continue to exist.” Insignificant Man , the film about a nonconformist politician, has surely made some enemies in the process that it took more than six months to get censor board clearance.
International viewers
Anyway, the resistance at home has ironically boosted the interest of international viewers and the film was screened at 14 international film festivals, including Toronto, BFI London, Busan, Brooklyn, Sheffield, Sydney, Moscow, Washington, and more. Mr. Kejriwal is an interesting politician who fits very much into the global narratives of resistance politics or alternative politics, noted Ranka.
“International audience drew similarities with conditions of India and their countries. They drew similarity between the AAP and the Spanish Left-wing party Podemos and the rise of Kejriwal with Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn of the U.K.”
“All the leaders came up as anti-establishment politicians who fought against status quo. But the challenges they faced were similar. It’s kind of a archetypical story. Somebody rising against existing parties. They may have small victories and have many large failures. But what the failures do to the party are very important,” she noted.
The film produced by Anand Gandhi, Khushboo Ranka, and Vinay Shukla did not try to idolise AAP leaders or romanticise their personal lives.
“The film was shot in an observational way. There are no interviews or voice-overs. We try to engage the audience in a way that they can form their own opinion,” Ranka said. “Finally, when the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) cleared the film without any cut, it showed we were forced to wait for more than six months for nothing,” she says.
Insignificant Man is the first film by the director duo and they are yet to decide the date of release in the country.
