Tatsam Mukherjee 
At the recently concluded MAMI Mumbai film festival 2024 which ended with Sean Baker’s Anora on Thursday, two war documentaries, No Other Land and Russians At War were programmed and scheduled to play.
The former documentary, directed by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists and activists comprising Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal, chronicles the life of Adra, a young Palestinian, as he films the homes in his community being destroyed by Israeli soldiers. The latter, directed by Anastasia Trofimova, is a French-Canadian production chronicling the lives of Russian soldiers on the front lines of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Both films were scheduled for the ‘World Cinema’ section at the festival, but at the last minute, were removed from the line-up. An email and a text message to most festival delegates stating that the films wouldn’t be shown, and were instead being replaced with other films.
A statement shared on the festival’s official social media handle stated that the films had been pulled from line-up because of being unable to procure ‘necessary permissions’ in time for the films.
As per the rules of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB) for films playing at non-commercial film festivals, the director (of the festival) is required to apply for exemption from certification for all films. For this, the ministry is sent a list of all the films with an accompanying synopsis for them. The government is supposed to dispose of such requests within 15 days of receiving them.
Likely flagged for their politically sensitive content by MIB
Sources say that both No Other Land and Russians at War were likely flagged for their politically sensitive content by the MIB. India’s stance to the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine may have something to do with it.
The MAMI festival has been known to be a supporter of and platform for ‘political’ works like Prateek Vats’s Eeb Allay Oo!! (2019), Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2022), among many other titles in recent years. Showing both the foreign documentaries at the festival would have been par for the course.
“The response for non-exempted films is usually about a possible law & order situation arising after a film plays,” said a source who did not wish to be named. There’s also a lack of transparency because no reason is given. It appears as though some fall through the cracks, while some get pulled out like in the case of the two aforementioned war documentaries.
When The Wire reached out to co-director of No Other Land Yuval Abraham he said he was unaware that such a thing had happened. The festival source says that’s not surprising for filmmakers from conflict regions who are often not in the loop around a film’s exhibition at festivals. “The distributors and sales agents usually look after this.”
*The Wire reached out to a PIB spokesperson for a comment on the matter of the denied exemption certificates to the two films. This piece will be updated when we get a response.