Farmers on camera

Over eight months between 2020 and 2021, soon after the Shaheen Bagh protests went silent, farmers from all over the country — and largely from Punjab — made it to the street peripheries of Delhi from their homes. It became one of the biggest, most organised non-violent protest movements of modern times, which, as Bedabrata Pain’s documentary Déjà Vu — being screened at various venues across India now — chronicles, resonated with farmers even in America. Among a glut of books and documentaries, both short and feature lengths, two narratives stand out, both full-length documentaries: Pain’s Déjà Vu and Farming the Revolution by Nishtha Jain, an incisive, cinematic documentarian known for The Gulabi Gang, a pink-wearing group of defiant activist women from Bundelkhand, central India, who fight for the rights of women and Dalits. This is Pain’s first documentary film in a distinctly polymath journey — his last film was Chittagong, which got him the National Award for Best New Director, which was long after he contributed to 87 patents as a scientist at NASA and was part of the team that invented the CMOS image sensor. “We’ve been getting amazing responses to the film everywhere, especially in the UK where the screenings are ongoing at the Bertha Dochouse,” Jain says.