Women journalists are fair game for killing: Nupur-Basu

Independent journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker Nupur Basu has directed a number of documentary films including Dry Days in Dobbagunta, Michael Jackson Comes to Manikganj, Lost Generations, No Country for Young Women, and Mothers of Malappuram. Now, in the collaborative project Velvet Revolution, different directors come together to profile women journalists who have paid a high price for speaking the truth. Executive producer and director of the documentary, Nupur says she hopes that it brings into sharp focus the increasing dangers on women journalists worldwide. “Since Velvet Revolution was premiered in Delhi this year at the IAWRT Asian Women’s festival in March, we have travelled with it to New York, London, Kathmandu, Kolkata, Patna, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Srinagar and Shimla,” she tells us. It also won the Best Documentary in July in the Feature length documentary segment at the Kashmir World Film Festival. Excerpts from an interview...

As a journalist helming this project, were you able to look at it from a gender neutral point of view?

As a female journalist for 35 years, when I came on-board to make this documentary film for International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) on women and media, I certainly had to focus on my subject — who, in this case happened to be female journalists. There has been a worldwide alert by organisations monitoring journalists’ safety issues on how the numbers of attacks and targeted killings of women journalists was on the rise. I had been concerned about this issue for a while and had been saying that we are “missing our own story” by not highlighting these attacks on journalists. This provided my springboard for making Velvet Revolution. The lens was firmly on women journalists the world over and the challenges they faced covering conflict.

On what levels does this documentary operate? What elements of it do you think were essential for it to hit home?

To answer your second question first, we wanted to front and centre the issue of growing threats to women journalists in this film, who are now fair game for killing because those in authority do not like the stories they write and the questions they raise before society. Yet these women journalists on the film are so extremely dedicated and passionate about their work and would not change their profession for any other. It shows the extreme courage of Bangladesh blogger, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, the wife of late Avijit Roy who was slain on the streets on Dhaka in 2015. I was determined to get Bonya on the film and finally convinced her to speak for the first time in a documentary. She explains why despite the deep personal loss and trauma of the killing of her husband, she returned to edit the blog — Muktomona. “I could not leave my co-warriors in the middle of the battlefield” she says in Velvet Revolution.

For your first question — the documentary operates at several levels — conflict is not just physical but also psychological. When Dalit women journalists working in Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh say that the upper caste people won’t let them enter their home when they go to do a story, that is conflict of a different scale. Most of the women journalists from Syria, Cameroon, Afghanistan, UK — all talk about the physical dangers and the psychological pressures they are subjected to.

What are some of the challenges that the women you have portrayed in the documentary faced?

To talk on a macro scale, it has been seen that women journalists face double threats — first, in the form of personal attacks and secondly with the atrocious trolling on social media platforms in the most misogynistic way where they are threatened with rape and kidnap of their loved ones... Clearly dissent is not being tolerated by both state and non state players who are out to attack our profession and Velvet Revolution graphically shows that.

With four different country directors, what was the process of bringing them together like? Did it make your job more challenging?

This was a global collaboration model with which IAWRT has been making long documentaries. It is an excellent model that allows you to tell a global story with minimum carbon footprint and on a very modest budget. Only filmmakers associated with IAWRT can come on board — so after I took the assignment of the Executive Producer, I put out my vision for the film to the membership and we received 18 pitches. We chose three directors — from Philippines, India and Cameroon and we asked a fourth filmmaker from Canada to go and do the segment in the USA with Bonya Ahmed after she agreed to come on the film. I garnished it with more interviews with award winning women journalists from Syria, Afghanistan, UK and the women who worked on the Panama Papers where some of the women journalists were hounded for speaking truth to power. Working with all the women directors was exciting and the film’s outcome is a testimony to that positive work.

As a female journalist, have you ever come across a conflict like that, where you felt threatened?

Although I have not felt any overt threats so far, there were certainly unnerving moments when I was filming in Peshawar, North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and also Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. So far we never imagined we would feel unsafe in our own country in India — but now India is fast becoming one of the most dangerous countries to report from — how shocking is that? And how did we slide in media freedom in this manner?

Velvet Revolution will be screened at Godrej ONE today at 5 pm.