Shirley Abraham is a Cannes award winning Indian documentary filmmaker. Her work is supported by Sundance Institute, MacArthur Foundation, Pulitzer Center, Chicken & Egg, Field of Vision, IDFA Bertha Fund, Catapult Film Fund, Filmmaker Fund and BBC. She was a fellow of Sundance Labs, Cluster of Excellence Heidelberg and Goethe-Institut. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "The Cinema Travellers", directed, produced, written and edited with Amit Madheshiya, is her debut film. It premiered as Official Selection at Cannes Film Festival 2016, winning the Special Jury Prize L’Oeil d’or: Le Prix du documentaire. The film has won 19 awards globally, including the President’s Medal in India. She has also made "Searching for Saraswati" (NYT), "The Hour of Lynching" (Guardian) and "The Great Abandonment" (upcoming, Guardian). Shirley has been a juror at festivals including CPH:DOX and Mumbai Film Festival and a panelist on the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Fund.
Q: Please introduce yourself and your project briefly
I am a 41 year-old Indian woman, and an independent documentary filmmaker. For many long years, I used to identify myself through my resistance against the world— that I would conquer my childhood trauma, the economic deprivation, the grief and the loss that life brought me. Of late, I read my life as more than me raging against the world, but me in concert with the world. I have been working on my mental and emotional health, seeking centering, acceptance and solace within the world. We are perhaps our struggles, but we certainly are our joys.
Q: How has this film challenged you as a filmmaker?
Decades ago, as a child in a turbulent household, the movies were my sanctuary. Today, living in a deeply politically fractured world, with a resurgent right wing, films are still that life-raft. Not of escaping, but of finding a way to glean from this chaos, to make sense or meaning of this senseless reality. I see this film as a challenge and possibility- a moment of defining and practising witness-bearing. To create and define the languge of what the powers do not allow to exist or blossom. I am aware that poems can’t diffuse bombs but I believe art can bear witness and reveal ourselves to ourselves. I believe that every film asks of us to exercise a new muscle, seek a new creative and emotional depth to the work. Not only does it challenge you, it also makes you anew as a filmmaker.
Q: How would you describe your approach to filmmaking?
My approach to filmmaking rests on the belief that documentary work is a gift of time. In time, one’s own life also accretes into the film, as part of the film. This is when we start to see art as life, and sculpt from it. I also repose much faith in the discoveries of the unknown, a challenge as old as we have known Plato: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” Again, trusting the unknown is the nature, the inspiration and the fuel of life itself.
Q: What made you apply for CIRCLE?
Last year, I found myself seeking a safe, trusted, creative and generative space of being, and of workshopping and talking films. CIRCLE came as that benediction.
Q: Can you compare your experience at CIRCLE with other similar platforms that you have been part of?
I have been blessed to be a part of film workshops and labs in the US and Europe. CIRCLE, while it stands among the best in pedagogy and rigour, is most memorable for the camaraderie that an all-women cohort comes suffused with. There is a solidarity and love that comes from how similar we are, even as practitioners across geography, how resonant our experiences are and how united we feel in our diverse struggles. It can often be rigorous and terrifying to work for years on a film and this meeting of minds and souls was re-energising. That is really one of the best antidotes to the scary loneliness that can come with filmmaking.
Q: How has participating in CIRCLE helped you and/or your project?
One of things I took away from CIRCLE is defining the needs of the project and the needs of ourselves as being two separate and unique things- and in my specific case, it would mean a woman filmmaker from an emerging country like India. The needs of the project are external to us, and our own needs, quite internal. And I realized that as documentary filmmakers who are willing to walk through a wall to make a film, we validate and respond to “external” needs, external changes, external uncertainties, more than our own internal needs, changes and uncertainties. The fulness of being a filmmaker would ask of us to acknowledge both, and to be responsive to both. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot, to advance the project in terms of its own needs and for myself too.
I feel that in terms of the former, the idea of writing a documentary has really stayed with me. It being an essential creative process unto itself, and not just something directors do ‘on the side’. Or by default. I’ve always recognized writing more as an instinctive part of the directing process, but I learnt that there is a physicality to it -- the defining of how the drama unfolds in your film, that is a very intentional process. And writing the film is one process that is sovereign from writing about the film, that is, the many grant applications. :)
Q: As a woman working in the industry, have you faced any barriers or issues related to your gender?
Absolutely and constantly, within my country and outside, in deep and sometimes perplexing ways. There is an indexing of women, and naturally, also of women filmmakers. It manifests in pervasive and wide-ranging beliefs, behaviours and responses. I was once musing to a non-Indian friend about how I have made life choices that could nurture my artistic voice, even if it meant eschewing creature comforts to be able to make this existence financially viable, chosing to not be married or have a child since they definitely dilute the kind of devotion I would want to funnel into my career choices. I don’t regret any of them though. When I said that to my friend, they said, almost with reproach, your ambition sounds very male. They were voicing what the world almost holds against documentary filmmakers, and especially those who are female-identifying, and from the global south. Of late, I have started mindfully realising this and sensitively addressing the many gaps and chasms, for myself and the collaborators I work with.
Q: What would you change in the way women are treated in the film industry?
Equality is a buzzword with much marquee value but I suppose that is also old school feminism. Is the idea only to seek “equality” with male counterparts, I sometimes wonder. I understand that some kind of human-resource-department generated clauses could be legislated by collective will- such as sensitivity in remuneration, child care, maternal leave and benefits, etc. But the eventual understanding will be located deep inside the calcified layers of society.
In a more elemental way, the world of film making must work in consonance with social attitudes. We need to keep hacking away at the roots of patriarchy, that seeks to show women “their place”. I find it heartening that increasingly, women are fighting to negotiate their physical, cultural and social space. A few years ago, a shining example in India was the Why Loiter campaign. It sought to challenge gender-dictated ideas of access to public space, by women who were actively ‘loitering’ – sleeping in parks, drinking tea at roadside stalls, and through discourse- organising plays and workshops. I love this line I read somewhere, ‘All protests are not marches, some are strolls.’
Q: Which women directors have helped to shape your worldview and filmmaking approach? Why?
Pirjo Honkasalo is one of them. She is as radical in her empathy as in her craft. The Three Rooms of Melancholia has never left me. It is profoundly deep and moving in its observation of the Second Chechen War and the toll it takes on children. I remember the humanitarian worker taking the children away from their ailing mother, to an orphanage. The humanity and restrained form of the film in this wrenching moment is a cinematic feat.
Q: Do you have a favourite documentary film? Why is it one of your favorites?
Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World is one of my old favourites. In the film, there is a moment when scientists lie down, ears to the Antarctican ice, listening to sounds of the seals below. This meditative moment is built around the sound of the calls of seals and a landscape that is as bare as ancient poetry. In this moment, Herzog is divining the mysteries of the universe. I see what it means for a movie director to be a director of landscapes.
Recently, I loved Smoke Sauna Sisterhood by Anna Hints. Set in the cozy smoky saunas of Estonia, it is an intimate look at women in a moment of profound communion as they share their deepest secrets. And then they take cold plunges, almost baptizing themselves of their shame and grief. It left me spellbound. The film is the testament to how a filmmaker can use the symphonic range of cinematic tools and harness the raw power of cinema.
Q: What is the most important thing for you as a spectator? What do you search/expect to find in films?
I expect to be moved. There are times that cinematic form moves me, but emotion, that oldest hack of all, is most precious.
Q: What advice do you have for other filmmakers?
In no particular order—
Have a plan A and B, and know that most of them may not work.
If you’re a first time filmmaker, don’t hold it against yourself (even as others might). There is something deep and true about being that person. You have no hindsight, and so go and take the risks you feel you need to take. Be reasonably foolish.
Take your chances. They may or may not pay off for you, but chances are, you are leaving the field better than you found it, for your comrades.
‘Be a little annoying.’ is one of the most useful pieces of advice I once received. I see it’s a thin line, and of course do not stray from respecting others, but I champion the value of being your own evangelist.
If you feel emotional, be unafraid of it. It’s okay to direct through your tears. Our storytelling is unique for who we are, and we don’t not need to rob it of ourselves.
Seek joy. Even if the world is crumbling around you. What we get to do is rare.