With the age of disinformation in full, apocalyptic swing, films like Vinay Shukla’s While We Watched offer a frightening but necessary window into the void – a void where fact and freethinking cannot survive and sensationalism and propaganda dominate. To put it bleakly, “the Fourth Estate is now the Deep State” – sobering words from the documentary’s main subject, news anchor Ravish Kumar.
Like many countries, India has succumbed to volatile nationalism in the last decade, led by its prime minister Narendra Modi. Shukla’s film picks up in the run-up to Modi’s reelection campaign in 2019 where he enjoys the backing of rabidly biased media hosts – comparable to Fox News and other right-wing American news channels to this day, but particularly during Trump’s term in office.
These channels spout 24-hour vitriol about Pakistani, Muslim and Maoist “terrorists” who threaten “Mother India” and its Hindu community. Anyone saying anything to the contrary is branded an anti-nationalist whom viewers are encouraged to harass. They boast, too, about their sky-high ratings despite an absence of hard evidence; meanwhile, Kumar’s NDTV is painted as the last major bastion of independent, critical thought, for which it is financially suffering with a dwindling viewership.
Compared to the amped-up Alex Jones types he’s up against, Kumar has more of a thoughtful Jeremy Paxman energy in his nightly Prime Time reports. But he’s no less passionate – pleading for rationality when violence breaks out, holding the government to account for ignoring poverty and unemployment in favour of scaremongering, and urging viewers to not simply be ‘ratings’ but human beings who can think and choose their country’s future for themselves.
Shukla’s filmmaking is deeply sympathetic to Kumar, taking time to show his close relationships with his young daughter and supportive, intellectual wife, and deflated but generous encouragement when his colleagues escape the sinking ship in droves. He’s also admirably thick-skinned, answering every abusive call he receives after his number leaks on Facebook – even starting a singalong of the national anthem with one caller who (ironically) struggles with the lyrics. It’s painfully obvious that a man who really does hate his country, as his detractors accuse him of, would never put himself through all this.
While We Watched has a stronger sense of storytelling than your average doc – especially your average political doc. Some scenes even feel slightly staged, or at least played out as prompted by a director. Without a narrator or interviews, this technique adds important context, and an engaging, cinematic quality: scenes are cut together like a fly-on-the-wall drama, aided by a stirring score used sparingly so as not to take away too much from reality.
It takes sharp editing and a level of respect for one’s audience to tell a factual story like this to those who may not be familiar with it. If only While We Watched really was a work of fiction – rather than a cautionary tale that western media has already left it too late to learn from.
Dir. Vinay Shukla (94 mins, 15)
While We Watched is released in cinemas and digitally on Fri 14 July
words HANNAH COLLINS
