Director, Writer: Nisha Pahuja
Cinematographer: Mrinal Desai
Editors: Mike Munn, Dave Kazala
Music: Jonathan Goldsmith
To Kill A Tiger, Nisha Pahuja’s Oscar-nominated documentary on the 13-year outdated survivor of a gang rape in Jharkhand and her father’s choice to face by her, and use the cumbersome courts as a system of redressal, begins with a line that quakes an moral quandary: “The survivor you are about to see is now over the age of 18”. The phrase ‘now’ is an early warning that the movie was shot by means of her teenage years, and that she gave consent to the movie, to the usage of her within the movie after seeing it, as a girl of age.
But why even is a digicam on a rape survivor underneath the age of 18? “Filming the rape survivor when she was a minor and using that footage in a documentary film revealing her face and disclosing other details is a violation of Indian law,” Rebecca Mammen John, a Senior Advocate on the Supreme Court of India, advised critic .
Can we rationalize that act of bringing her to the digicam — whether or not it’s footage that will likely be used or not, that she is comfy with it or not? Can consent be given retroactively? If it may be given on this method, can it even be revoked retroactively? These are thorny questions as a result of a lot of the discourse on consent relies on bringing readability to an act that’s not all the time so amenable to those arbitrary traces, which really feel like they’re drawn in sand, however are embossed in authorized paper.
Putting “Kiran” within the Spotlight
The thinker and feminist theorist Amia Srinivasan, when speaking of intercourse, places this fetishization of consent to check, as a result of the present vein of intercourse positivity, “sees consent as the sole constraint on sex, thereby moving sex out of the political realm entirely,” by which she means, it doesn’t ask of itself why somethings are desired and given consent to, and never others. The mere act of giving consent is taken into account sufficient. Pushing that related thread into this combine, the choice to present and never give consent to be filmed is a formality that comes from sure decisions — why had been these decisions made within the first place? Can we topic the needs of a filmmaker to extra political scrutiny past the straightforward query of the topic’s consent?
The movie requests us to not share figuring out photos of its baby topic, and but, makes use of her face — this was the selection made later, along with her consent. It offers her one other figuring out identify, “Kiran”. These are cases if you brush up towards the inherent exploitative nature of documentary filmmaking, the violence of turning an individual right into a protagonist, one which might solely be countered by piecemeal kindnesses.
