Shilpi Gulati Feels There Is More Outreach Of Documentaries Today Than Ever Before

Two-time National award winning documentary filmmmaker Shilpi Gulati feels that in order to make things easier for documentary filmmakers in India, the government must activate the various State Film Boards to support production and distribution, besides reviving the Films Division and its various initiatives by consulting and engaging with filmmakers working in this format.

“I also feel that an ecosystem of support for documentary filmmakers needs to be developed, perhaps a platform where films under production can be mentored, concerns regarding funding, censorship and exhibition can be addressed, and various artistic practices of documentary practitioners can be shared,” says Gulati.

Recipient of the National awards for Best Anthropological/Ethnographic Film for her movie “Qissa-e-Parsi” (2014), a portrait of the diminishing Parsi community in India and “Lock and Key” (2018 ) for being the Best Film on Social issues, which features the life and struggle of five recovering drug addicts, who share their journey and talk about the significance of mental health, the filmmaker smiles that what attracts her most about the documentary format is the fact that it keeps slipping away, and as a director, there is hardly a moment when you are in complete control of the making of the film. “There is an inherent uncertainty to the process which one has to learn to embrace,” she says.

Currently working on a project tentatively titled “Astrologer Nani aur Pocket Book Nana”, based on her grandparents, Gulati, whose first film was “Dera tun Dilli” (2011), based on oral narratives of refugees from Dera Ismail Khan, elaborates, “My latest is about two ordinary individuals who lived rather unconventional lives. Through their worlds of astrology and pulp writing, I am trying to understand India in the 1960s and 70s.”

Also pursuing her PhD dissertation from JNU, where she is examining the national and international structures of funding and exhibition for documentary films, Gulati, a pass-out from TISS, who was recently in the US on a Fulbright scholarship as a visiting researcher at Columbia University, and has also made two feature documentaries, would like to work with short formats again. “I am looking to work across boundaries of theatre and film, the two fields I have been associated with for a long time now, but somehow kept separate. And yes, I also fancy the idea of working on a picture book.”