Vivek Chaudhary Interview On ‘I, Poppy’ | Why Documentary Filmmakers Are A Dying Breed In India

When I saw the poppy crop in 2017, I was blown away by its beauty while passing by the highway. The fields of white poppies are the most beautiful sight in the world. You then realise two things: one, it makes opium; and two, there are so many layers of oppression and corruption enslaving farmers because of this. Also, when I was doing this film, I was reading a lot of material on Poppy, including fiction like Amitav Ghosh's trilogy and other nonfiction books about Poppy. 

Everywhere you see that Poppy has a very long-standing relationship with humankind. We have lived here for hundreds of years. It was becoming clear that Poppy is a very integral part of how we have lived, and also the fact that Poppy, on one hand, produces morphine, which is the best known painkiller known to mankind. And on the other hand, it can also produce heroin, etc, which can kill you. So it depends on how we approach the crop. 

It seemed natural that the film should be called I, Poppy because it's also Poppy's story with people. It just seemed like this is a central character in this narrative and we should give as much space as possible to bring that out. 

My family is from Rajasthan’s Barmer. My grandfather, uncles, aunts and a lot of cousins still live there. So, during every summer vacation in school, my parents would take us to the village, and I would see opium addiction and opium usage in my village and it is rampant in that area and a big part of our culture, weddings, death and birth ceremonies. 

While growing up, I had lots of questions about Poppy and didn't know until much later in 2017. In 2016, I was there for a few days, and in the last days of March, the government was going to ban the sale and purchase of poppy husk. I realised that people, especially the very old people, just could not stop talking about opium. They were wondering about going to the illegal market and buying it. Then I thought that this was the time to dig more and try to understand it.

In 2017, I went for research. Honestly, in the beginning, I wanted to make it a kind of investigative project where I wanted to have a lot of stakeholders, like farmers, smugglers, opium addicts, patients who require morphine but don't get it because of all this leakage in the system, narcotics officials and police. I had this entire range of people and wanted to make a film to show everything about this system and how it is wrong. That was the original idea that germinated from the research I was doing in 2017.

I realised two-three things: one was that it is such a difficult story to tell, because there are so many layers and links and it’s going to be very hard to tell the entire story.

Second, telling the story of the farmers was turning out to be risky. We were mobbed by farmers. People knew where we lived. There were nights when we couldn't sleep. We soon realised it was going to be much more time-consuming, risky and difficult.

I didn't actually have this family at all in my research. I met them in a very roundabout way. First, I had three farming families that I researched in 2017 and in 2018, I started shooting with those three families. With one family, I shot for three weeks, and with another family, I shot for two months. But slowly, they were starting to become very nervous and refused to talk. They weren't convinced. I was sent from one farmer to another and that’s when the film automatically became more investigative.

There was a day when we were shooting something clearly illegal; there were narcotics and police and we were worried about the officials catching us. We were then mobbed by farmers who wanted to hit us and break our camera. They eventually let us go, but broke our memory cards. Mangilal, I had met at a protest about two months before this incident had happened, but I hadn't really liked him. 

The same night when we were mobbed, Mangilal called us and invited us to his house. We reluctantly went and as soon as we reached, we saw the mother. 

First, it was a series of conversations. We asked if we could shoot them. They were okay with it and fairly normal. The next two to three days, we shot some more and told them about making a film about the entire ecosystem. The mother wasn't sure because she’s never seen a film in her life. For the next few months, she asked us about her agenda. When we showed her the first trailer, that’s when she understood what we were trying to do. Both the mother and son were happy that their story was being told. 

We showed them everything we were making and they were fairly confident that we would not represent them in a negative way. They had the final right to say no.

That was also a process of fine-tuning things because in the first season, we didn’t know what the angle of the story was. We were shooting a lot from October to March and had six months in the middle. So, we would edit stuff in that phase and while we were editing and breaking down stuff, we realised our mistakes. As the mother and son have different characteristics, we had to shoot them differently. For the mother, we had to put very static frames, make it very quiet, because that is the rhythm of her life; while with the son, we had to hold the camera and had to run with him. It had to be very dynamic. So that came after the first season's shooting. 

I think there are two reasons—one is from their world and the other is from mine. In that world, farmers are stuck in the system where they are made to look like criminals, but we, from an urban and activist point of view, can question the system if they put anybody in jail or extort from anybody. This is not a democracy. We knew the system is like this but should it be like this?

There are about 80,000 opium farming families, but except for Mangilal in this case, we didn’t find many people asking the questions he was asking. The greatest thing that happened with this film was that in one household, we could find both points of view—to fight or not to fight—which connected to my life in the way that my parents questioned my vision of making the documentary. I think that’s why the film travelled all over the world and people connected with it because we are all facing broken structures everywhere, and our parents are all asking us the same questions. We all were experiencing this, so it was a double layer of not just their life, but also from our life—whether we should also fight the system, if it’s futile to fight the system and if we don't, then who will? Those were the questions in our heads as to why this happened. 

I try to make films where I think something can happen. For example, our first film, Goonga Pehelwan (2013)—my friend and I made it and we also did a lot of activism after that. Five years after the film was done, the Indian sports policy for deaf and mute people changed and that was a lot. There was a lot of chatter on social media about the film; we were trying to push it and were able to change the Indian sporting policy for those people. There was a personal satisfaction that we could do that.

Today, especially with this system, I'm not that hopeful, honestly, because it's so deeply entrenched. Here, there is so much active money to be made that I have a feeling that it's going to be very difficult to change it. But I still think that we should document these stories and bring them out, giving hope to people like Mangilal. 

It was definitely a conscious decision. We knew the ending very early. We also wanted to be honest about the true reality of this world and not tell you a story to soothe you with a happy ending. We wanted people to go with a heavy feeling. I'm okay to give happy endings to films if that’s the reality, which sadly is not. It hardly works that way. Good people hardly win. So then the film had to reflect this truth, especially what we are seeing in this world. 

In all his scenes, he has this mask of positivity and it never falls. But in the last scene on the terrace, it comes down a little bit and there is confusion about what he has done. He also questions himself whether he has done the right thing. In the next breath, he is fighting back. So we had this middle ground of discussion, where he was like it was too much of activism, but few years after we stopped shooting the film, the realisation dawned on him, and he's also getting older and has to handle all the debt and all. There was regret, questions; but he's such an idealist inside that his will can't necessarily change fully. 

We were planning to make a documentary only. But with documentaries, what is harder is that it is real people talking about these things. So, it is almost a piece of evidence. It’s a little bit riskier than fiction. But, we will still have to sell our film to some OTT platforms in India, and for that we will have to get a censor certificate and we aren’t sure how it will be possible for us to get it. But we will go into the system; let's see what they say and how they react to it. I’m sure there will be cuts. 

We would love for it to be on big screens. Even though it's a very intimate story, we have shot it like a big screen—from the music to the sound. But in our country, it’s very difficult to sell documentaries in theatres. On the other hand, it's also anti-establishment. So, it will be more difficult amidst the wave of Dhurandhar and other big films. They will not clear anything like this. There will be the same problem in OTT as well because it’s a soft and slow film. 

Today, OTT platforms are all so scared that they are not willing to touch anything. We have seen what they have done to Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee’s films, which tells us so much about what is happening. 

We are hopeful and trying to release it on OTT so that it reaches a larger audience and there are discussions. 

Absolutely. If you know about this film called Santosh, it was such a stunning and heartbreaking film about the realities of the system here, and the UK made it their entry to the Oscars. We rejected the same through censoring and that is the state of affairs that we are in. This is while out-and-out propaganda films are cleared. Now, the masks are off. Those films get state subsidies, tax breaks and are tweeted about by everybody.

In India, there is no money for this. The French co-producer came on board because their government supports good films. So he became a co-producer. He didn't get his own money into the film. He took this film’s proposal and gave it to the French cinema funding and they called it a great film and gave the money to make the film. In the West, especially in Europe, they really value this kind of art, and they not only have their government to fund, they also have government channels that buy. So, they have a full ecosystem. In the eighties, we also used to have this, even though the money was always less in India; but in the last 30 years, it has been destroyed. We can’t even think in our part of the world that there should be state funding.

Neither the state nor the private producers will fund this kind of film. I took so many years and met so many people to make this film. It wasn’t easy. I would love it if someone from my country funded my projects. If you see in the last five-six years, all the documentaries that have come out of India are funded by the West. 

One is funding, the second is censorship, which is a big part of the puzzle. The third is obviously distribution. There should be a distribution model in place. In the US, UK, France, Germany, etc, there are slots and also specific theatres for indie films where they are given slots and you can fill those slots up and make some money. Because how do we sustain ourselves? Documentaries take so much time to make and we're also qualified, smart people who are not doing other things but doing this. We also have to pay bills. So how does one do that? Everything is stacked up against us and they don't want us to make anything like this. 

They don’t want us to talk about the truth because we are building our own narrative. It's a narrative war. That’s why I think we are a dying breed. 15 years ago, there were 50 of us standing and trying to make sense. Today, there are just a few of us and some obviously new people, because Indian films are doing well abroad and people are interested. But documentary or indie filmmakers are getting disheartened a lot because there is no support. So how are they going to keep doing this work? 

The thing is, this kind of work attracts certain kinds of people who sadly can't do anything else. I started watching documentaries at 17, 18 years old, and it showed me the world in a way that I would have never understood otherwise. I am addicted to this world.

Internationally, it is doing well. There are funds and distribution opportunities but it’s very competitive. With AI, YouTube and social media and attention being so diverted and right-wing governments all over the world cutting funding and so on, it becomes an uphill task. 

There is a lot of interest, which is great, but there are a lot of limitations coming up.

I think even if I show it to a full right-wing group, maybe not everybody will like it. In the film, we haven’t shown any party in a bad light. It is slowly building its case and by the time it does, you are totally invested in the characters. I would love to show it to the people on the other side of me and just have a conversation and tell them that this is also the truth. I understand your truth is a different truth, but you see that there is a truth to this.

It’s a very intimate and human story. So I have a feeling that people will get it if they watch it. 

I have already written two scripts with my cinematographer (Mustaqeem Khan), who is also a writer: one based on my first documentary, Goonga Pehelwan, and the other on the world of opium. We wanted to do multiple characters and show the bleakest of the system. For one, we have producers and hopefully, we'll find for the other film as well. We'll try to find funding and start to shoot it and do it on a slightly bigger scale, without diluting our politics and won’t pander to what is happening. Our avenues will be limited because we may not be accepted by the system. But that’s okay. We also have independent fiction and documentary films in mind. 

I have been very excited by fiction in the last three years. So, will definitely do fiction too; but documentary is my first love.