n the glistening world of Oscars, with the red carpet-ready gowns and tuxedos, this year in the best documentary category, films talk about family, social justice, book banning, war and politics. One of those is a feature documentary directed by Nisha Pahuja. A tad over two hours, To Kill A Tiger stands as a riveting chronicle, portraying a father’s arduous journey in the relentless pursuit of justice for his daughter.

As I sat down to write a review of this heart-rattlingly urgent documentary, news trickled down about yet another killing of a 13-year-old girl. She was allegedly killed in Jharkhand’s Godda district, in the eastern province of India, after she resisted a rape attempt by two men aged 21 who have confessed to committing the crime.

The irony weighs on me.

On average, every 18 minutes a female is raped in India. According to the data for the year 2021 released by the National Crime Records Bureau, 86 rapes are reported daily on average while 49 offences are committed against females per hour. This is notwithstanding the fact, that more than 90 percent of rapes go unreported and less than 30 percent are successfully prosecuted.

News stories of sexual assault on women frequently vanish into the vast expanse of the media universe or are buried under overloaded judicial processes. At worst, they are swallowed up by the toxic rationalisations of masculinity, unless someone pursues further investigation, as the cinematic documentary To Kill A Tiger does, by unveiling compelling real-life stories that urgently demand broader attention to the rampant epidemic of misogynistic violence.

Tending to the rice fields, Ranjit— the doting father to his daughter, the victim of a sexual assault in 2017, shares a poignant revelation towards the end of the film. “I was once told, ‘you can’t kill a tiger by yourself,’” recounts Ranjit, “But I replied, ‘I’ll show you how to kill a tiger all by yourself.’ And so, I did.”

That sets up the narrative arc of the tale.

Emotional journey

Forged over the course of eight years, the documentary, winner of more than 20 awards at festivals around the world, highlights the pervasive and deeply rooted nature of male violence against females ingrained in the fabric of Indian society. How does one tell such a story? Caught in the spotlight, Ranjit’s stance captivates the attention of the Srijan Foundation, an NGO dedicated to sensitising men and boys about women’s rights. They see in Ranjit a symbol for their cause, a beacon of inspiration for other men.

The New Delhi-born Canadian director Nisha Pahuja says “To Kill a Tiger actually started off as an entirely different film. That film, Send Us Your Brother, was a more pointed and direct exploration of Indian masculinity. The focus of the original work was Mahendra Kumar, the women’s rights activist who has a key albeit a minor role in To Kill a Tiger. Mahendra was leading a large-scale programme in Jharkhand, where he and other activists worked with men and boys to change their ideas on gender. One of the men enrolled in that programme was Ranjit. As Ranjit’s story unfolded, I began to feel that his odyssey could serve as the spine of the film and that Mahendra’s work and his personal life would add a larger context.”

“These storylines, with their own inherent richness and complexity, were meant to decode the ‘why’ behind the tragic sexual assault at the centre of the film—an assault echoed over and over again in headlines that continually and numbingly come out of India. It’s a ‘why’ that I’ve been grappling with as a filmmaker for over a decade. To understand how men and boys are created, specifically in Indian culture, was a way for me to cast light into shadows,” she adds.

To Kill a Tiger charts the emotional journey of an ordinary man thrown into extraordinary circumstances—a father whose love for his daughter forces a social reckoning that will reverberate for years to come. The allure of this approach stemmed from its simplicity. It offers a continuity to a rich body of work that Nisha has undertaken over two decades. This cinematic endeavour is a continuation of Pahuja whose short film for Global’s investigative news and current affairs programme 16×9 Indian Bus Outrage investigating flaws in the justice system in India following the brutal 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on a bus in New Delhi. It was a recipient of an Amnesty International media award for Canadian journalism in 2015.

Pahuja approached Ranjit’s complex situation with a keen understanding of its layered sensitivity. With prior experience of directing films in India, notably The World Before Her (2012) that juxtaposed the competition among women aspiring to be Miss India with Hindu nationalists defending their beliefs (awarded Best Canadian Feature at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival), she was mindful not to take sides in Ranjit’s narrative.

In the documentary’s narrative fabric, intimate scenes from village gatherings reveal a spectrum of perspectives, featuring voices even from the fathers of the accused. Yet, as the legal proceedings persist, a faction of villagers resorts to coercive tactics against Ranjit—employing emotional manipulation, proffering bribes and escalating to threats of arson and murder. This mounting tension culminates in an increasing animosity directed at the film crew earnestly documenting these unfolding and unsettling events.

The narrative

Nisha’s husband, Mrinal Desai wields the camera like a poet’s pen. He deftly captures the village’s serenity, meandering through its tranquil spaces and deciphering the unspoken dialect of gazes—all the while encapsulating the hidden subterranean explosiveness simmering beneath the narrative’s surface. As if drawing inspiration from the locale, a mining town famed for its rich mineral veins, the cinematographer moulds haptic images, extracting their nuanced meanings and tensions. The cinematic shots in the labyrinth of Indian courts of Ranchi, the state capital, reminds one of his early work in Chaitanya Tamhane’s Marathi-language courtroom drama, Court (2014).

The cinematic narrative commences with Ranjit articulating the profound experience of welcoming his daughter, Kiran, into the world. He cloaks her in his affection, challenging the notion that love transcends the confines of material reality. With her penchant for narrative-driven films, Nisha crafts intricately woven worlds that captivate with their visual splendour reminiscent of the Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet. With the fluid grace of a naturally moving camera, she crafts a distinctive stage for her female characters. Wrestling with the profound intricacies of human existence remains a constant in her exploration. Driven by an unwavering social commitment, her characters find their roots in the lower echelons of society, injecting the narrative with a compelling force that propels it forward.

In the National Film Board of Canada-funded documentary, her storytelling, delicately rendered, possesses a distinctly feminine and sensual allure. That made me think of Jane Campion, one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, and her classic short - tightly controlled 9-minute drama - Peel (1982), The Piano (1993) and more recent The Power of the Dog (2021). Though a tale of the father’s pursuit, this film is predominantly concerned with female characters struggling to be heard, recognised and understood. The intricacies of other figures in the tale—namely, the ward member, Ranjit’s wife Jaganti, and, most notably, his daughter Kiran—unfold in delicate layers. While Kiran survives a brutal crime, her character transcends simplistic victimhood, revealing nuanced facets that enrich the narrative. Beyond mere identity, the pluralism of experiences emerges as a distinctive hallmark in Nisha’s artistic repertoire.

Embedded ethics

Yet her ethical instincts rule her craft. “I would be remiss to bring up morality and not touch on the ethics of filming a survivor and, what’s more, a child. When I first heard about what happened to Kiran, I decided we would hide her identity—it’s what Indian law demands and unquestionably felt like the right thing to do,” says Nisha. Elaborating on her dilemma she continues: “As I got deeper into the story, however, it became clear that both Indian law and Indian culture were united in seeing the assault as a ‘shame’ or ‘loss of honour’ for the survivor. I started to feel that by not showing her, I was in fact perpetuating the very prejudice I was critiquing. But who was I to impose this view on a child, especially a child from an incredibly vulnerable community?”

In the documentary, Kiran exists as both a child and a survivor. Today in her twentieth year, she is so much more. She stands tall and looks out to a brighter future and wonders about falling in love and what she will tell her beloved.

What happens to the subject and the protagonist when the film moves in a different orbit as a cultural artefact and the filmmaker onto another film?

“It’s also my hope that together we empower her and support her healing as part of this film’s journey in the world—a journey with Impact at its heart and one that’s being planned carefully and strategically with lawyers, documentary impact strategists, therapists and an advisory council made up of women’s rights and human rights organisations. The coalition we are building around her, and her family, has the power to ignite a movement; one that encourages other survivors to come forward and men to stand with them,” says Nisha. It vindicates in the growing list of executive producers that are attached to this film including Dev Patel, Mindy Kailing, poet Rupi Kaur, Dr Atul Gawande, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Mala Gaonkar, S Mona Sinha, Samarth Sahni, Deepa Mehta, Anita Bhatia, Geeta Sondhi, Shivani Rawat, Andrew Dragoumis, Anita Lee, Andrew Cohen et al to ensure this story does what it can in the world.

But with the distressing news of yet another assault on a 13-year-old girl in the same region filtering through, the sickening irony piles up, each layer adding a punch to the gut within the narrative of this documentary.

However, this is emerging to be a thorny issue. Anna M M Vetticad, author of 'The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic, points to the ethical and legal violations inherent in the making of the film. The issue of filming a minor rape victim makes it vulnerable for the filmmaker given the stringent guidelines under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act 2012. The victim’s parent’s permission does not suffice, one has to get a directive from a Special Court if it deems in its view that such disclosure aligns with the best interests of the child involved. While another Canadian filmmaker Leena Manimekalai has patently dismissed the film as “a classic example of a settler colonist gaze on an indigenous child survivor of gang rape in a developing country.”

— Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer. He splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva