My opinion on Shaunak Sen’s Film ‘All That Breathes’ and why Documentary Filmmaking is dying and why the Indian consciousness is not represented in films anymore

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• My basic thoughts are this: With the gradual hold of globalisation on cultural forms increasing, India is not able to produce from it’s own *indigenous* perspective anymore. The films now when trying to be socially-conscious and politically-aware do so from a western leftist view. Our films are not producing anything new, and specially documentary films are caught in this absolute banality that represents nothing of the state of India. They just romanticise everything or capitalise on concepts that have been popularised globally in the past decade. Even when expressing ideas of *goodness, compassion,* we do so from a western logic of liberalism and identity politics. This was NOT the case with early Bollywood films from the 2000s. They were seeped in indigenous philosophy (their view of the human, of identity, was very different from what it is now – which is a more colonised framework) , and they represented the state of Indian society to an extreme accuracy.

  May 21, 2023 at 3:39 am

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• I agree that the influence of western commercial media has completely changed the trajectory of Indian cinema. Especially when it comes to dialogue. I genuinely feel like north Indian cinema was becoming more mature and introspective during 2000s with films like Swades and Rang de basanti (which had its faults but it was a start)

  I really hate how they write dialogue in Bollywood films these days. They’ll start a line and the language switches to English completely inorganically. I understand that colonial influence has caused the infusion of English terminology in our native communication, but literally no one goes off on a tangent purely in English with an unnatural accent and then switch back to Hindi because they probably reached their limits. It’s infuriating and it makes for a very uncomfortable viewing experience because the actors evidently can’t carry their skills across linguistic lines.

  May 21, 2023 at 12:34 pm

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