Making Connections in a Disconnected World
A Letter from the AlumNest by Rintu Thomas
Rintu Thomas is the director of Chicken & Egg Pictures-supported film Writing With Fire, alongside Sushmit Ghosh.
Chicken & Egg Pictures has supported 350+ women and gender nonconforming nonfiction directors from all around the world, and that number continues to grow each year. Letters from the AlumNest is a blog series from the perspective of some of our Nest-supported filmmakers.
The thing that excites me most about the process of documentary filmmaking is the way I’m always taking parts of me into places never planned. When my co-director Sushmit Ghosh and I saw a photo story about a woman journalist walking through a “media dark” region in India, distributing a newspaper that she herself had reported and produced, our first instinct was intrigue. In a region notorious for its endemic violence against women and the Dalit (‘low caste’) community, how does their Dalit women-run newspaper Khabar Lahariya survive and thrive?
We entered the story at a historic moment for our protagonists — after 14 years of being a print paper, they were transitioning to digital.
Most of the women had never touched a smartphone, and yet they were confronting risks to break traditions — both on the frontlines of India’s biggest issues and within the confines of their homes. In telling the story of India’s only newspaper run entirely by women, Sushmit and I not only encountered some unbelievably courageous women but also confronted our own assumptions and privilege.
We were embarking on the film’s final edit while the world was shutting down and uncertainty was taking over all our collective lives. Writing With Fire premiered at the first-ever fully virtual Sundance Film Festival, and we didn’t know what to expect. For the “world premiere,” we sat on our living room sofa in front of the TV screen with our family, friends, and their dog and cat. Yet it felt so lonely.
And then something beautiful happened. Our phones pinging non-stop with people from all across the US tagging us in tweets, Instagram stories, and Facebook posts about their experience of watching the film. That’s when we realized the power of the moment. On that sofa, we were joined by an invisible but a definitive audience of 5,000 people from across the US: we got messages of love from a teacher in Colorado, a fireman from San Jose who watched it with his family, an elderly grocery shop owner from New Jersey. By the end of the festival, Writing With Fire received two Sundance Awards in the World Cinema Documentary competition and sold 10,000 tickets to a diverse audience. The thread of connection was not lost on us:
Our story about women from historically marginalized communities harnessing the power of digital media premiered in a virtual year. We were making connections in a disconnected world.
And that’s the spirit with which we approached the next 90 film festivals across the world where the film played virtually. We found ways to leverage each opportunity (however small) in an innovative way. Our protagonists participated alongside us on panels; film character Meera led a conversation with the students at Columbia Journalism School; and we engaged local journalists in different countries to watch the film and share it in their community. When the International Women’s Media Foundation saw the film, they got in touch with Khabar Lahariya, and last week Christiane Amanpour handed the Khabar Lahariya newsroom the prestigious IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, an award that “show[s] people that women journalists are not going to step aside, cannot be silenced, and deserve to be recognized for their strength in the face of adversity.”
Last month, the film played at the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin, and Khabar Lahariya co-produced a 3-day conference on its side-lines. Historically, in their first international ‘live’ co-production, women from the heart of Uttar Pradesh worked with women from the heart of Berlin to put together a wonderful speaker series on journalism, democracy, and storytelling. Writing With Fire has won 25 international awards (the most special one for me is from Le Grand Bivouac International Film Festival, where a jury consisting of inmates from the Chambéry Jail House in France awarded us the festival’s Horizons Prix prize). Watching the film travel from behind a screen has been bittersweet, but meaningful: in the very act of putting the film out, we were able to link its impact.
In the eleventh month since the birth of Writing With Fire at Sundance, we will be watching the film with a US audience in-person for the first time at DOC NYC. In both making the film and putting it into the world, we have indeed travelled to places we never planned and just like the women in our film, flirted with the unknown!
Writing With Fire will make its New York City premiere at DOC NYC Film Festival on Thursday, November 11 at Cinépolis Chelsea. The film will have a United States theatrical release beginning this month, including runs in California, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, Indiana, and Florida.
Rintu Thomas is an award-winning director-producer from India whose work is supported by Sundance Institute, Chicken & Egg Pictures, IDFA, SFFILM Documentary Film Fund, Doc Society, and Bertha Foundation, among others. She is a 2021 Logan Elevate Grantee and a 2019 Sundance Fellow. Her debut feature documentary Writing With Fire won two awards at Sundance ’21 (Audience Award and Special Jury Award: Impact for Change). Described by The Washington Post as “The most inspiring journalism movie — maybe ever,” Writing With Fire has played at over 90 festivals and won 25 international awards. Over the last 10 years, Rintu’s films have been used as advocacy tools for social impact, included in the curriculum of universities, and exhibited globally — becoming catalysts for new conversations. Rintu lives between New Delhi and a quaint mountain town in North India.
