While We Watched film review — bleak glimpse into India’s changing media

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Speaking truth to power has gone dangerously out of style. Such is the dark message of While We Watched, the kinetic and bleakly effective new documentary about media and democracy from Vinay Shukla. The location is modern India: too vast and particular to stand in for anything but itself, yet also, perhaps, a microcosm.

Shukla trains his camera on journalist Ravish Kumar, veteran mainstay of independent broadcaster NDTV. Kumar gives the film a compelling human centre, his mood forever readable on his face: frowning perfectionism at work on a story, a wry grin in moments of crisis.

What follows pushes his gallows humour close to despair. The year is 2019. A momentous national election beckons for India. In a film with not nearly enough time for all it wants to say, scene-setting is minimal. Then again, for Kumar too, there is a feeling of being taken by surprise.

The subject has long reported on economic inequality: hardly uncommon in Narendra Modi’s New India. “I haven’t changed,” Kumar smiles on-air. But the Indian media have — seismically, by Shukla’s telling. NDTV increasingly looks like a lonely outpost. Rival channels are filled with pro-Modi polemic in place of reportage, delivered by deafening hosts. Hawkish nationalism makes great product for government and cheerleaders alike.

Kumar, by contrast, will face interruptions of broadcast signal, and worse. But the deepest cut is the slow bleed of viewers towards the national good news story relentlessly told elsewhere. There, even to mention a mood-spoiler like joblessness is to risk being called unpatriotic. And to be unpatriotic is to become, in turn, precisely the kind of enemy within whose demonisation drives ratings. “Shrewd, isn’t it?” Kumar remarks.

Publicly called a traitor, his phone number left to circulate on social media, Kumar keeps arguing back. (Once or twice, with defiant mischief, in song.) But he also comes to seem the doomed hero of a fait accompli. If the news since requires a spoiler warning, the real ending comes after the credits. NDTV is now owned by Modi ally Gautam Adani. Kumar no longer works there. At four years’ remove, the film makes a stark history lesson.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas now