New DelhiFour documentary films – two on Kashmir, one on the suicide of Hyderabad scholar Rohith Vemula and another on the trouble in Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University – have received a thumbs down from the Centre’s Information and Broadcasting ministry for failing the “sensitivity” test.
Films screened at festivals do not require a censor certificate but need a censor exemption from the Union Ministry for them to be screened.
Ministry officials say they scrutinize documentary films on four particular parameters. They concluded that films in question were “sensitive in nature” and threatened the “integrity of the country”, the officials said.
The film-makers are up in arms, saying three of the documentaries were to be screened shortly at an international festival in Thiruvananthapuram.
Academy chairman and filmmaker Kamal said a cultural emergency was existing in the country.
There is an undeclared emergency now with the government telling us what to eat, what to read, and what to watch, he said at a press conference in Kerala on Saturday, according to the Hindu.
Among the documentaries to be denied exemption is In the Shade of Fallen Chinar, directed by N.C. Fazil and Shawn Sebastian.
The short documentary shot in the Kashmir Valley a few days before the current cycle of unrest began takes a peep into the lives of a group of young Kashmiri artistes who are also university students. It talks about what inspires their art and how art takes the form of resistance in a conflict-ridden valley.
Also banned is The Unbearable Being of Lightness, directed by P.N. Ramachandra. The film is structured around Shopcom, the shopping centre at the University of Hyderabad, the epicentre of student protests following the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula.
March March March, directed by Kathu Lukose, looks extensively into the student protests at JNU last year and its aftermath. It looks at what prompted the massive student uprising and the national/anti-national binaries that came into play
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