Farming The Revolution And My Sweet Land Pulled From India Doc Fest On Government Pressure

The inaugural edition of India Doc Fest has revoked the screenings of Nishtha Jain’s Farming the Revolution (2024) and Sareen Hairabedian’s My Sweet Land (2024), citing a denial of government permission for their public exhibition. On its Instagram page, India Doc Project, an independent initiative that’s spearheading the festival, put out an official statement via its artistic director Aditi Sharma that “regretted” the outcome. It also added, “We also recognize that such moments reflect the times we live in ­–times that make the act of documenting, witnessing and viewing all the more urgent. The very absence of these films is a reminder of why spaces like Doc Fest must exist: to uphold dialogue, dissent and the freedom to see and be seen.”

The documentary festival will be held from 26 to 28 October in New Delhi.

Chronicling the 16-month-long farmers’ protest between 2020 and 2021, Farming the Revolution had been awarded the Best International Feature Documentary at Hot Docs Festival 2024. Last year, Jordan dropped My Sweet Land shortly after picking it as its Oscar entry citing “diplomatic pressures”. The documentary follows 11-year-old Vrej, who dreams of becoming a dentist in his village in Artsakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave within Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been mired in a violent dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia since the 1980s. Artsakh fought for decades to become a breakaway state, an independence movement that ended with the Azerbaijani offensive of 2023. Jordan’s officially selecting it caused furor in Azerbaijan which claimed the film was overly sympathetic to Armenians displaced by the conflict. Additionally, My Sweet Land was banned in Jordan.

Few days preceding the India Doc Fest official announcement, Jain wrote on her Facebook wall, “Censorship of documentaries comes in many ways. It’s not just by the state which has also finally happened in my case but by audiences who presume that documentaries are boring, or a mere coverage of people’s lives or events."

She added, "The lack of audience interest gets reflected in lack of distribution. And often filmmakers are forced to show films in venues that do not do justice to the film’s cinematic aspirations. People are happy to watch a documentary on a laptop, with the least effort, frequent breaks and pressing the ff button. For most screenings in India, the filmmaker pays for their travel, or if in the rare case their travel is covered, most definitely not their time and efforts. Making documentaries in India is an act of masochism at best and accepting the caste system in film funding, production and distribution. Documentary remains the Dalit in film hierarchy. Only documentary as activism makes sense, not documentary as an art form.”