Sundance 2023: ‘Against the Tide’ an Interview with director Sarvnik Kaur
Two Bombay fishermen navigate the effects of modernization on their friendship and livelihoods.
‘Against the Tide’ directed by Sarvnik Kaur, World Premiering at 2023 Sundance Film Festival in World Cinema Documentary Competition, is a masterful vérité doc from India.
The film is a moving portrait of a friendship tested by the strains of the modern world. Its power is in the same deeply emotional thrust delivered in Honeyland (for those who saw it in 2019), and surprisingly, it was edited by the same team behind Honeyland.
Rakesh has kept faith in the traditional fishing methods while Ganesh has strayed away from them, embracing technology. The film tells a tale of deep friendship and rising conflict between the two men against the backdrop of an adoring sea, which is increasingly turning hostile because of climate change.
Rakesh and Ganesh are so close, they consider themselves brothers. Both are fishermen of Bombay’s Indigenous Koli community, but they’ve taken contrasting paths. Rakesh uses his inheritance — his father’s boat and the knowledge passed down by generations of Koli fisherman — to fish in the traditional ways, while Ganesh — who was educated abroad — has instead embraced modern, technology-driven, and environmentally destructive methods of deep-sea fishing, causing increasing friction between the friends. But with declining fish populations caused by pollution and invasive species, neither man is finding much success, adding to the burdens facing their young families, and testing the bonds of their brotherhood.
Beyond the story itself, I was faced with the conundrum of more frequently occuring question of why do we work ourselves up being moved by films of people we learn to love, when we know the way of our materialistic world will destroy their way of life. “These people”, the Kolis, are inheritors of the ancient and great Koli knowledge system — a way to harvest the sea by following the moon and the tides. Does it make us better people to watch docs like this or Honeyland? How can we reconcile the intimate view of these two men and their families and communities with knowing that their way of life is doomed (in this case by technology and climate change)? What is the point of watchng these docs showing us all the injustice of the world? I know I am not going to become more active in fighting climate change. I am too busy living. So then what? What action can we take to rectify the way we know all too well the world is going? There are too many issues needing to be addressed; social action is way beyond my own time and energy.
After I praised the film for its beauty, its honesty, its intimacy and the love it revealed sustaining the traditional but poor Koli community living in Bombay and barely getting by in their heritage as fishermen, basically, that was my first question to the director Sarvnik Kaur.
What’s the point of it all?
Director Sarvnik Kaur’s response surprised me.
SK: Making this film is a way for me to channel these things, to make sense of the world which is not following society’s mandates. I was given an opportunity to learn how to live life. I never thought about what the Kolis were going to do. The Kolis will take care of themselves. Life as it is lived on the outside, our modern obsession with possessions and growth of wealth does not encompass their lifestyle. They face hardships including finding food for their families while caring for newborn children as a community. With love, they create the joy of life and existence.
Kaur‘s deeply humanistic and intimate approach to these two men at a crossroads in both their friendship and profession immerses the viewer in their experiences, where neither man is hero or villain in the choices they make to survive in an imperiled world. She presents a microcosmic, sea level view of the fragility of our relationship with the changing environment while affirming what it is to be alive and human.
SK: Perhaps no one would put their problems on the table unless I did, but I did it for myself, to be honest and to learn about life from one of its sources. I learned so much from Rakesh, Ganesh and the community.
How did you begin your journey?
For the past ten years, I have lived next to a Koli village. This has allowed me to get closer to them, to witness their daily concerns. In 2016, when the regional authorities decided to transform their market into a commercial complex without consulting them, the “Collective of Women Fish Sellers” immediately put up resistance. I became actively involved with them and made some short films that they used to conduct their campaign.
This is how my journey with the Kolis began, in trying to be as helpful as I could be. I have spent the last five years with the Koli community and have come to understand their lives — the conflicts and the joys — as a filmmaker, as an ethnologist, and now as a friend. With time and patience, we have established a relationship of trust.
I began conceiving the idea in 2015 at the end of my film about Kashmir. That film ‘A Ballad of Maladies’ which explores the tradition of political resistance in Kashmir through the work of those poets, musicians and artists who have turned their art into weapons of resistance during periods of heightened state repression and violence in the region. The film was banned from broadcast on the national network but it won India’s 64th National Film Award for Best First Non-Feature Film in 2017, Best Film at the 11th biennial Film South Asia and Best Documentary at the 10th IDSFF Kerala.
Winning the award felt like a sort of co-option by the state, but the co-director certainly deserved an award.
I watched the Koli being pushed out and thought it was the same problem, though it was being labelled differently. My own honesty was at stake in telling their story as well, rather than being co-opted by the state who bestowed a prize on a film that was banned from ever being viewed. As an artist, I have only my own honesty. That the state took my story for its own purposes was unbearable. This new film gave me the chance to empty myself of their poisonous lying.
I wanted the film to be life affirming.
When did you begin shooting?
As I watched two friends, both indigenous Koli fishermen in Bombay, being driven to desperation by a dying sea and their friendship beginning to fracture as they take very different paths to provide for their struggling families.
Meeting Rakesh was like finding a treasure trove. He is not stupid. Generations before him have understood the moon and the movement of the stars and the fish. He took a marker and on my whiteboard drew a bird’s eye view from the moon and stars shining light upon his boat and how the moon’s refracted light attracted the fish and lit the way for the fisherman.
I realized the film was about one people (the Koli) becoming divided in itself. Watching these two men conversing in 2019, I knew that was how I would build the film. I saw there were two factions in the community and one faction was “othering” the “other”. Like two monkeys fighting while the cat comes and takes the cream, each side blames the other for the lack of fish which in truth is being depleted by offshore oil drilling and climate change.
Rakesh and Ganesh fight to survive in this implacable reality they have no control over. Their strategies for getting by diverge, sometimes clash, but what they have in common is that they are fueled by the same determination to exist in a changing and merciless world where respect for nature and tradition weighs very little in the face of the economic and internationalized interests of some.
Ganesh chooses a different route of bringing in LED lighting on a large scale to attract fish but which leads him into forbidden watersd as well as into compeitition with the Chinese and big business. Both struggle to survive. Rakesh’s solution is the most radical.
And in the end, the two are reconciled by the birth of a new child. Rakesh has solved the problem by selling his boat and downsizing to a smaller boat but catching only high-value fish like lobster which bring in higher prices sufficient to feed his family while keeping overhead low. He has dignity and no debt, lives more slowly and celebrates life.
What attracts you to your subjects? Your previous and first film, Soz — A Ballad of Maladies, explored the tradition of political resistance through music and poetry in Kashmir.
SK: The subjects reflect my own family’s history. My grandparents were born in Pakistan when the country was part of British India. In 1947, India and Pakistan were divided and the two countries entered into a mortal conflict, which continues today. My grandfather’s family, Sikhs, fled Pakistan to a refugee camp in New Delhi, where my father was born. In 1984, my grandparents managed to leave the camp and build a modest house, but it was completely destroyed during an anti-Sikh riot. I was one year old. My family had to move again.
I grew up with the trauma of these successive uprootings and a constant fear. This personal story brings me back to the Koli community, whose territory and tradition are also threatened. Bombay is a suffocated city where space is scarce and expensive. The Kolis’ lands are now the last available space in the city center and their owners, whose income depends on increasingly meager fisheries, are often forced to sell them to rich entrepreneurs or politicians who will build luxury residences with a view. The Kolis who still live there will be driven out in ten years by land pressure and rising waters. Even the most resistant, like Rakesh, will inexorably abandon their house and, with it, their way of life, a part of their history and their traditions. Like my father and his family, they will one day be displaced and become refugees.
Koli concerns are the concerns of all of Bombay. They’re the guardians of the city’s coast, the sea and even the mangroves. The Koli community of Bombay will be sacrificed for lucrative real estate deals and generalized inaction regarding climate change. It will soon disappear, and I am Zilming its last stirrings.India is one of the places where the effects of climate change are the most dramatic. Every year, the monsoon and the meteorological hazards become more violent and unpredictable. Since 2000, some of Mumbai’s shores have retreated by more than 20 meters and tomorrow, the city’s climate displaced will number, at the very least, in the hundreds of thousands. If nothing is done to curb climate change, many experts agree that Bombay will be largely submerged by 2050, with the Kolis’ land being the first to be flooded.
Rakesh is in a way the ancestral conscience of Ganesh. But by sticking to the age-old traditions of his people at all costs, he risks putting his family in danger. I didn’t want to make a film about who is good or bad; I wanted simply to witness and record as sincerely as possible the stakes that these two intelligent, honest and hard-working young men face, and the consequences that their decisions entail. By following the life of one and then the other, I hoped to make the viewer question his own convictions and the choices he would have made himself if he had been in their place.”
How did you begin and find support for this film?
SK: In December 2019 I shot a pilot for the film because I had the clarity of vision that it was about one community and the two “brothers” facing the crisis of the sea with its polution, lack of fish and that everything that was happening in the sea was showing itself in the financial crises, social crises and familial crises.
That’s how I started to get the workshops and funds. Once you begin, you are led, as if by your own nose. Then you find champions all over the world. If you care, you find others care about the story and the struggle.
It was life affirming. I felt lost, persecuted, alone. It was eye-opening that someone in Amsterdam or the US or France cared about my story and my struggles, to be recognized. The everyday lies are not the real world. The read world is in being true to oneself and then others lead you into life. That is the real world.
She is a recipient of multiple grants from Sundance Film Fund, Catapult Film Fund, IDFA Bertha, San Francisco Film Fund, AlterCine Foundation, HotDocs Crosscurrents International. She has also been a fellow at Hot Docs Accelerator Lab, IDFA Academy, SFFILM and the Chicken & Egg Eggcelerator Labs.
Further support came from Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in collaboration with the CNC, Procirep Angoa.
Do you have advise for other doc filmmakers?
SK: Lower your ambitions and strenthen your resolve. I do not want the moon.
I understand how radical it is and how documentary filmmakers (and journalists) themselves manage to make meaning out of their lives just as the Koli fishing people do, by living in a community, covering costs and needs basic in order to live a life of joy, love and sharing. That is radical and that is the lesson so many people come away with when they delve into the deeper meaning of life.
Do like Rakesh, downsize to support your life and that which is most meaningful in it. Thank you very much Sarvnik! You have restored my own resolve!
For my readers who have gotten this far, here is more informatin about the key crew:
PRODUCER. Koval Bhatia is a filmmaker and producer based in India. She has been heading A Little Anarky Films for 12 years, during which time she has directed and produced commercials, impact films and TV shows. She began her journey as an international producer with Against The Tide, which she has pitched at multiple markets and forums across the world. She is currently a Getting Real Fellow at the International Documentary Association (IDA). Koval is a graduate from Eurodoc and a recipient of the Emerging Producer’s Bursary from the World Congress for Science and Factual Producers, and her feature documentaries as a producer have been awarded grants by Sundance Documentary Fund, Hot Docs, Catapult Film Fund, Docs By The Sea, SFFILM, Al Jazeera, and DOK Leipzig. She is a member of EWA and BGDM.
CO-PRODUCER. Quentin Laurent founded Les Films de l’Oœil Sauvage with Frédéric Féraud in 2015. Based in Paris and Marseille, the company mainly produces art-house documentaries and Quentin is particularly interested in non-Western narratives and viewpoints, in approaches that reveal spaces that have remained invisible or try to reconsider the perception of familiar places. He has recently produced or co-produced, Kinshasa Makamboby Dieudo Hamadi (Berlinale 2018), Overseas by Soa Yoon (Locarno 2019),Aswang by Alyx Arumpac (IDFA awarded 2019), Downstream to Kinshasa(Cannes 2020), Dreaming Wallsby Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier (Berlinale 2022), Things I Could Never Tell My Motherby Humaira Bilkis (Visions du Réel 2022), and Kristos the Last Childby Giulia Amati (Venice 20223)
CINEMATOGRAPHY. Ashok Meena is an independent cinematographer from Rajasthan, India. He did his post-graduate degree in cinematography from the Film and Television Institute of India, working towards building an independent visual language at work. Known for his experimental films and videos, his independent work has been traveling to festivals and art galleries across the world. Ashok has shot several documentary films including Kamal Swaroop’s Pushkar Puran,which had its European premiere at the 60th DOK Leipzig.
EDITING. Atanas Georgiev is one of the owners of Trice Films and Film Trick from Macedonia, subsidiaries of FX3X. His directorial and producing debut, Cash & Marry, won many international awards and recognition. It was followed by Avec l’Amour, a festival favorite in 2017 premiering at Hot Docs, and soon after with Honeyland in 2019, a triple winner at Sundance Film Festival and nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Documentary and Best International Feature for 2020.
EDITING. Blagoja Nedelkovskiis a film editor and musician based in Skopje, Macedonia. He graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Film & TV editing in Skopje in 2000. For almost two decades he has actively working on feature films, documentaries, TV series and music videos in Macedonia and the Balkans. He has also spent some time in Vienna, Austria, where he freelanced as an editor and an artist so that he could pay for his music studies at the Music Konzervatorium Franz Shubert. Some of the more notable projects as an editor are the films Punk’s Not Dead, State of Shock, To the Hilt,The Year of the Monkey, and Honeyland.
SOUND DESIGN. Moinak Bose is a sound designer based out of Bombay, India. He is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, with a specialization in sound recording and sound design. Moinak’s work includes the internationally acclaimed films A Night of Knowing Nothing in 2021 (sound design) and All That Breathes in 2022 (sound recording), both of which won L’Œil d’Or (The Golden Eye) for best documentary at Cannes. The films have been screened at many festivals and won top prizes at TIFF and Sundance Film Festival respectively. Against The Tide is his latest work as a sound designer
International sales agent is Deckert
North American Distribution: Submarine Entertainment.
Genre: Documentary
Country: India/France
Language: Koli, Marathi, Hindi
Year: 2023
Duration: 97 min.
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