2002 Gujarat carnage was communal violence at another scale, shook me to my core, says filmmaker Rakesh Sharma at IDSFFK 2025

Confronted with communal violence in his neighbourhood in Mumbai in 1992, Rakesh Sharma’s first intuition was to organise a reduction camp, which he and his mates ran at Jogeshwari for a couple of yr, till new houses had been constructed for the victims. They lent authorized assist too, to file FIRs and get compensation. However a decade later, when he witnessed the Gujarat riots of 2002, he knew he needed to intervene as a filmmaker. Thus was born Last Resolution, one of many seminal works of Indian documentary filmmaking.

“It was my try at intervention, a forewarning that I used to be shouting from rooftops that if we don’t examine this type of communal politics, it’s going to destroy the social cloth. Now we have seen what occurred after that and within the 23 years since then,” says Mr. Sharma in an interview to The Hindu through the seventeenth Worldwide Documentary and Brief Movie Competition of Kerala (IDSFFK), the place he’s being honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Initially, he couldn’t deal with what he witnessed on the Shah Alam reduction camp in Ahmedabad, with him shutting down the taking pictures after a day, overwhelmed by the size and nature of what had occurred.

“I used to be no stranger to communal violence, however what had occurred in Gujarat was at one other scale, as if one other face of organised violence had been unleashed in cahoots with the State, not simply vigilantes, however cops and the State working in tandem with the vigilantes. The character and the sheer depravity of the violence shook me to my core. I shut down as a human being and as a filmmaker. I couldn’t maintain filming. However after some weeks, a fierce kind of political intuition triggered in me that we had been witnessing the appearance of one thing new and I needed to intervene as a filmmaker,” he says.

Having begun his profession helping Shyam Benegal in filming Discovery of India (Bharat Ek Khoj), he says he did “eight years of company slavery” to purchase his freedom. The work he did in launching Channel V and later Star Plus in a method funded his documentary making. “So, folks like Rupert Murdoch have ended up funding Last Resolution,” he quips.

Whereas his documentary Aftershocks was narrated in first individual, Last Resolution doesn’t have a voiceover. It’s simply sequence after sequence of the victims and perpetrators of the Gujarat riots talking on digital camera, interspersed with visuals of the riot aftermath and speeches from the Gaurav Yathra led by the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and different Sangh Parivar leaders.

“It was a deliberate selection to not use voiceovers, as a result of then folks would think about the sort of phrases which might be getting used. I’ve been instructed by folks all over the place that the movie is balanced, as a result of I’m exhibiting the victims and the perpetrators. As a filmmaker, I do know that it’s something however balanced. I’ve a really particular standpoint and I make no bones about it. So it was a really deliberate act of structuring the movie, taking pictures it and presenting it in a sure fashion,” he says.

Mr. Sharma says he didn’t wish to preach to the choir or to the fundamentalists. He wished to focus on the bulk who’re ambivalent or apathetic or simply too busy incomes a dwelling or are victims of misinformation and propaganda. “To talk to this 80%, I needed to assemble in such a fashion that the narrative was unfolding in entrance of them in order that they might of their thoughts assess for themselves and kind an opinion,” he says. 

To the query how troublesome wouldn’t it be to make a movie like Last Resolution now – based mostly on any of the various communal flare ups from latest years – Mr. Sharma says, “You would wish navigational abilities in these hostile battle terrains. I won’t be capable of do it as I’ve been subjected to WhatsApp campaigns, is recognised and dealing with threats of varied varieties. However for others who’re underneath the radar, it’s attainable. I knew that the State would sooner or later come after me. So I had a protocol arrange with two mates that I might name certainly one of them each night at a selected time. If that didn’t occur, the belief was that I’ve already been picked up and so they have to maneuver a Habeas Corpus petition that morning itself. For filmmaking of this type, you want a contingency plan, so that you’re not caught unexpectedly when one thing unfolds.”