The two said that they were subjected to difficult situations during the making of the documentary, and had to spend a large sum of money to cover the expenses of the shoot.
New Delhi: Oscar winning documentary The Elephant Whisperers has made headlines once again, not for its win, but because of accusations of maltreatment against the makers of the film, the Hindureported.
Bomman and Bellie, the two mahouts who star in the film, have said that they were subjected to difficult situations during the making of the documentary, and had to spend a large sum of money to cover the expenses of the shoot. They also alleged that they have filed a case against the makers who threatened them to take it back, the report said.
The film had courted controversy since it bagged the Oscar as viewers were quick to point out the power dynamic between the filmmakers and the community they chose as subjects as well as the lack of this contextualisation in the film.
Sikhya Entertainment and the film’s director Kartiki Gonsalves have responded to the allegations. “The goal in creating The Elephant Whisperers has always been to highlight elephant conservation, the tremendous efforts of the Forest Department and its mahouts Bomman and Bellie. Since its launch, the documentary has raised awareness of the cause and had a real impact on the Mahouts and Cavadis community. Our honourable chief minister of Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin, has made donations towards assisting the 91 Mahouts and Cavadis who look after the state’s elephants, constructing eco-friendly houses for the caretakers and developing an Elephant Camp in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve,” their statement said.
The statement also said, “The documentary has been celebrated by heads of state across India, and the Academy Award is a moment of national pride that has brought widespread recognition for the work of mahouts like Bomman and Bellie. All claims made are untrue. We have a deep respect for all of the contributors of this story, and remain driven by the desire to create positive change.”
Boman and Bellie made the accusation a day after the Tamil Nadu government appointed Bellie as the first permanent woman elephant caretaker at Theppakadu elephant camp in the Nilgiris region, the Hindu reported. Chief minister M.K. Stalin presented the appointment order to Bellie at a special ceremony that was presided over by forest minister M. Mathiventhan, chief secretary Shiv Das Meena and Supriya Sahu, the report said.
President Droupadi Murmu also met with Bomman and Bellie as well as the other mahouts of the Theppakaadu elephant camp during her three-day visit to Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.
The women in the series were not stereotyped as being naïve or at fault, as they often are in media coverage.
The most hated man on the internet, according to a new Netflix docuseries, is Hunter Moore. The convicted criminal and self-described “professional life ruiner” Moore enabled the non-consensual distribution of thousands of private images by founding “revenge porn” website Is Anyone Up?.
The documentary captures what revenge porn is, how it is carried out and how traumatic it can be for victims. The women in the series were not stereotyped as being naïve or at fault, as they often are in media coverage. The series showed how the thousands of people who share the image play a role in revenge porn, not just the first person to upload them.
As a former probation officer, I’m interested in how society views sexual crime, and how we treat women who are victims. The docuseries could have gone further by talking about brave women as victims of gender-based violence, not just “revenge porn”.
This term overlooks that private images shared without consent are not always actually pornographic. It also blames the victim, because it suggests they did something to deserve revenge. While I’ve used it above as most readers will be familiar with the term, for the rest of the article I will talk instead about image-based sexual abuse.
The series doesn’t make especially clear that it is normal to take and send images of yourself as part of sexual self-expression, but when someone shares them without consent, it can be a form of domestic abuse. The internet is saturated with such images. There are now over 3,000 websites dedicated to image-based sexual abuse, and reports to the government’s revenge porn helpline are increasing year on year.
Victims of revenge porn become isolated and frightened of what others think of them. Because of this, many experience mental health issues including PTSD and depression.
As the docuseries showed, victims are usually female. Data from early 2022 shows that in the UK, 81% were. Their images are generally shared without their permission by men, though not usually those who hack into their accounts. Most image-based sexual abuse is perpetrated by ex-partners.
Many people imagine an angry ex-partner commits this crime as retaliation after an unwanted breakup. However, this is not always the case. A 2021 study of over 2,000 British people conducted by the law firm Slater & Gordon found some men wanted to scare their victim. Others thought it was “a laugh”, an attitude shared by the perpetrators in the Netflix documentary.
We live in a society where misogyny and male entitlement lead to violence against women and girls. “Upskirting” and images of breastfeeding taken without consent are also forms of sexual abuse, and evidence of the sexual harm caused to women in our society. A 2017 study found that the impact on victims of this kind of sexual abuse is similar to that of sexual assault. On this basis, many campaigners and researchers argue it should be a specific sexual crime.
What the series doesn’t cover
The Most Hated Man on the Internet series gave a sense of what was happening in the US, but not in the UK. To tackle this crime, the UK government is trying to regulate the internet. The online safety Bill proposes forcing internet providers to be more proactive in removing image-based sexual abuse, rather than waiting for victims to report it.
In England and Wales, “revenge porn” became a specific offence in 2015, with a penalty of up to two years in prison. The threat of sharing non-consensual private images became illegal in 2021.
Even with these laws, victims are understandably reluctant to speak to police. This isn’t helped when police officers don’t have enough training or understanding about these experiences. Some officers have blamed women for being victims of image-based sexual abuse. Currently, only a fraction of police reports of image-based sexual abuse lead to a charge or summons to court.
When victims do report, one-third of them don’t pursue a charge because they cannot be guaranteed anonymity in a “communications offence”. If image-based sexual abuse was a sexual offence, then victims would have to be kept anonymous.
Victim support
Another thing the docuseries showed was the importance of family support, both for the victim on an emotional level, and in seeking justice. The highlight of the series, for me, was Charlotte Laws, the mother of one of Moore’s victims. She campaigned against his website, and didn’t stop once her daughter’s image were taken down. She supported other victims and the FBI in a fight for justice against Hunter Moore.
Victims of image-based sexual abuse clearly need support, but not all have someone like Charlotte. Destiny Benedict, another of Moore’s victims, has since discussed how vulnerable and isolated she felt during her experience. The docuseries portrays Moore manipulating Benedict into sending him more content so he would remove photos of her children from his website.
The UK government has recently increased funding for the Revenge Porn Helpline. The helpline is a place for people to report being a victim, but also a source of support which helps take images down.
The Most Hated Man on the Internet has drawn important attention to this issue, but there is more we can all do to support victims of revenge porn, starting with recognising it for the abuse it is.
Jennifer Grant, Teaching Fellow, Community Justice, University of Portsmouth.
Algorithms are power and this power is with governments and with a few corporations.
Scientific thought is charming for many reasons. It expands human capabilities. It shrinks the world to fit our palms. It accelerates the passage of time: due to the explosion of the Internet, smartphones, social media, the last two decades feel much longer and richer. It also carries a moral halo, because science, unlike humans, doesn’t discriminate. Two plus two will always be four, irrespective of your gender, race, or nationality.
But what if I say that the interpretation of brute data changes for different people? A new Netflix documentary, Coded Bias, examines the disturbing prejudices of machines. Such biases impact hiring, housing, criminal profiling – the very lives of the people.
The documentary is a slim 85-minute piece, but it digs deep. It probes the historical definition of intelligence, which often hinged on a narrow conception: the ability to excel at chess for instance. It traces the genesis of Artificial Intelligence (AI), reaching Dartmouth College in 1956, where a few dozen (white) men decided the foundation of the technology. It discusses science fiction, the default domain of straight white men for decades.
This approach befits the material because history is hardcoded in data – especially the kinds fed to algorithms to understand human behaviour. The new machines are not creating a new society, argues the documentary, but merely replicating the discriminatory patterns of the old world, such as sexism, classism, racism.
Filmmaker Shalini Kantayya both portrays and pricks this story. The movie is centred on three main characters: Joy Buolamwini, a computer scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and author of the bestselling book, The Weapon of Math Destruction; and Silkie Carlo, the director of a UK-based non-profit organisation campaigning against state surveillance, The Big Brother Watch. A crucial commonality binds them all: They’re all women and Buolamwini is a person of colour — or, more accurately, the victims of the discriminatory automated software. Buolamwini, who eventually became a digital activist, has a personal story, too. She realised that the facial recognition software couldn’t register her presence, as it preferred lighter-skinned subjects. The absence of acknowledgement is an erasure of identity. Racism by any other means – or any other algorithm – smells as rotten.
Coded Bias asks perceptive questions about the state of our world, juxtaposing technological advancement with social fissures. When Amazon used automated software for hiring, it rejected all women applicants. That discrimination was not random: Less than 14% women occupy powerful positions in the tech giant. Facial recognition software disproportionally victimises Black men, targeting them for crimes they didn’t commit. The AI tools are more likely to be initiated in poor neighbourhoods, experimenting on marginalised people.
The reach of AI – and its use to control a large populace – is not just restricted to one country. China gets a lot of flak for its social credit score but move your gaze westwards: 117 million people in the US have their faces on the databases of law enforcement agencies – that is around one out of three people in the country. Street surveillance cameras have become ubiquitous in the UK, making every citizen a suspect. The Hong Kong protesters in the recent past spray-painted such cameras in defiance and defence.
Analysing different facets of technological growth, Coded Bias depicts a comprehensive – at times a terrifying – picture of a world struggling in its grasp. It examines the vicious side of machines, pondering the increasing chasm between the mathematical and ethical. Technology, in the universe of Coded Bias, is not something that will save us – rather it is something we should save ourselves from. The unchecked faith in AI also encourages subservience – and “being fully efficient, always doing what you’re told”, says Zeynep Tufekci, the Turkish sociologist, “is not always the most human thing”.
A facial recognition system at work. Photo: Reuters/Bobby Yip
Which is one of the main preoccupations of the documentary: machines dehumanising people. An automated software, for instance, has begun grading teachers in Texas, determining their competency. But those yardsticks are not disclosed, exacerbating the humiliating examining process. “How can this algorithm define me?” asks a teacher in Houston. “How dare it?” Especially if it’s an unfair “black box” algorithm.
Coded Bias presents a disconcerting vision of the future: machines shaping a tyrannical world denying people their basic rights. But the documentary extrapolates that question: Who is orchestrating the real control? Corporations, intent on selling people in different ways. First, they programmed and monetised our buying preferences and now they’re stifling our civil liberties. “It’s not what AI will do to us on its own,” says Tufekci. “It’s what the powerful will do to us with AI.” Our masters haven’t changed; they’ve just delegated machines to do the dirty work for them.
Even though Kantayya follows three characters – besides interviewing other experts and splicing archival footage – Coded Bias doesn’t have a dense plot. It often relies on explaining key information, making it talk-heavy. Some of it seems repetitive; some of it reminds you of another accomplished documentary, The Social Dilemma. Kantayya is aware of the limitation, constantly seeking ways to dramatise her scenes. She only falters occasionally, especially when adopting a fly-on-the-wall approach, when snippets of conversations among characters look staged for the camera.
But these quibbles fade in light of the remarkable revelations. Growing up, we were taught that “knowledge is power”. That aphorism faces its most crucial test in the 21st century. Because if knowledge is linked to power, then who gets to wield that power — based on what kind of knowledge? If the scientific advancement still produces software that reproduces the same hierarchy and segregations, then maybe we should ask ourselves, “What does this progress even mean?” Some, like Buolamwini, who testified before Congress advocating federal regulations, are starting to challenge that narrative. Amazon has paused police use of its facial recognition program for a year. Some American cities have banned the technology. So, maybe there’s hope. Maybe people can win this time. But even if we resolve this particular tussle, the documentary hints that the bigger questions – around individual privacy, institutional discrimination, industrial dehumanisation – will still prevail. Even if we save ourselves from machines, who will save us from… ourselves?
The film highlights the fast spiral down which Brazil went after a few good years of hope and economic wellbeing.
The documentary film The Edge of Democracy on Netflix is the Brazilian story of the end of military dictatorship in 1985, the climax of democratic maturity with the election of lathe worker Lula as president, the fall of democracy with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff through legislative coup in 2016 and the imprisonment of Lula to prevent him from contesting in the elections by a judicial coup in 2018.
It is a poignant and powerful narrative which starts with the people’s celebration of the rebirth of democracy in 1985 and ends with Jair Bolsonaro celebrating the past military dictatorship.
For those of us who followed with admiration Brazil’s rise in the first decade of this century and were saddened with its quick fall in the second decade, the film is just a visual summary of the facts. The fall of the admirable Lula and the rise of despicable Bolsonaro is a horror story.
The film highlights the fact that this would not have happened but for the political incompetence of Rousseff, who did not know how to handle the Congress and its crooked leaders like Eduardo Cunha and Michel Temer.
Cunha was against impeachment in the beginning, as seen in his statement. But when Rousseff refused to rescue him after he was caught red-handed with Swiss bank accounts, he took up impeachment as a revenge ploy. No Brazilian president can get bills passed in the fractious Congress of over 20 political parties without appeasing Congressional leaders overtly or covertly.
Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff in 2015. Photo: Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino
This is exactly why President Lula had to set up Mensalão scheme in which monthly payments were made to members of the Congress to consider and pass bills. But Rousseff was politically aloof and indifferent.
The film shows a Congressman complaining that she would not even take part in the traditional Brazilian “hugging of colleagues”. Rousseff grew opinionated and arrogant while at the same time remaining naïve and let herself be played by the veterans of these political games.
Rousseff should have, of course, resigned on her own, admitting moral responsibility for the massive and systematic corruption in Petrobras, which went on even when she was the minister of energy. The Workers Party and Lula, who were carried away by hubris, certainly deserved an electoral defeat but not an overthrow by a constitutional coup.
Sergio Moro, the inquisitorial judge and prosecutor had gone out of his way in the witch hunt against Lula by using even illegal and unethical methods to frame him. He abused his judicial authority by sentencing Lula to disproportionately long spells of imprisonment even when there was no solid evidence.
Moro also used every trick in the book to prevent Lula from contesting the elections and to damage the image of the Leftist Workers Party. Lula would have won the elections against Bolsonaro without doubt, but Moro had created a vacuum by keeping him out of the elections and this helped in the election of Bolsonaro, who has rewarded him with ministership. The illegal methods used by Moro has come out in recently leaked phone conversations between him and others.
Brazil had been emerging as a regional and global power around 2010 under Lula’s visionary leadership. His inclusive policies emancipated millions from poverty and injustice. Lula’s pragmatic and balanced mix of pro-poor and business-friendly policies became the role model for Latin America and acted as an alternative to the Washington Consensus, which had ruined the region in the eighties.
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva speaks during a rally in Curitiba, Brazil, March 28, 2018. Photo: Reuters/Rodolfo Buhrer/Files
The only thing missing from the film is the role of the US which targeted Lula and Brazil to contain the rise of the Left in the region. The US is believed to have played a role with its espionage, including inside Petrobras and in the office of Rousseff. There is speculation about a possible link between US agencies and the US-trained Sergio Moro who had imported the US system of plea bargaining to implicate Lula.
The Petrobras corruption was an institutional one shared by all the political parties and leaders. But Moro and company focused only on Lula. When others, including Temer, were implicated with solid evidence, the Congress and judiciary moved to save him and stop further investigations. When Cunha threatened to spill the beans against Temer, he too was jailed.
The director of the film, Petra Costa, has given a personal touch by weaving the story of her own family with that of the country. She has narrated the story in the first person. Her grandfather was a founder of the construction firm Andrade Gutierrez, which was one of the contractors involved in the building of Brasilia city. It flourished during the military dictatorship as well as during the Workers Party rule.
It was also one of those firms disgraced for corruption in the ‘car wash scandals’. But Petra’s parents went the other way and became Leftist revolutionaries fighting for democracy and justice. Her parents suffered imprisonment and exile. Her mother was put in the same jail where Rousseff was also imprisoned.
Petra was born in 1983 at the time of transition from dictatorship to democracy. One of her earliest memories was sitting on the shoulders of her mother watching a sea of people protesting for the end of military dictatorship. She grew up in a vibrant democracy which matured and flourished. Costa recalls her mother’s first impression of Lula as “the embodiment of all she had longed for: workers becoming political actors, opening the way towards a democratic path.
Jair Bolsonaro, once a far-right lawmaker is now the unpopular president of Brazil. Photo: Reuters/Ricardo Moraes
“She thought a New Brazil was born with her. But her hope turned to disillusionment thanks to the derailment of democracy in 2016 by the corrupt Congress leaders and the crooked judiciary. She cynically says, “Our country is a republic of families; some controlling land, others controlling media, some others banks, sand, rock and mines. These families sometimes get tired of democracy”.
One should see Edge of Democracy just as a short film about the “Big Brazil” in its passing phase when it actually moved towards a promising future. Even more mature and established democracies such as the US have suffered damage, as it is suffering now with Donald Trump, a much worse monster than Bolsonaro.
One should see the larger picture of the long term potential of Brazil, beyond Bolsonaro. Petra Costa says in her narration, “Our democracy was built on forgetting.”
Bolsonaro will be yet another forgettable phase of Brazil’s history.
What next for Brazil? The film has not given any clues. But my take is that Brazil has come out of bigger crises in the past.
R. Viswanathan is a Latin America expert and former ambassador to Latin American countries.
The Netflix documentary ‘They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead’ traces the filmmaker’s attempt to make a final film, a swan song.
Netflix occasionally throws up pleasant surprises, and not just in fiction. While most publicity is given to drama series or films, every now and then a documentary is released without much fanfare and watching it can be very rewarding. One such, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, about the last, abortive attempt by Orson Welles to make a film, is a superb exploration of an artist’s life and creative impulses. It is a sort of a ‘Lion in Winter’ meditation, as we see the great Welles, once feted but now forgotten, trying hard to make a final film, a swan song that will not just be his greatest but also his most commercially successful.
Welles, of course, is the director Citizen Kane (1941) and many more terrific films that followed – The Magnificent Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai, The Stranger and Touch of Evil, and the actor in classics like The Third Man and Othello. Who can forget him as a corrupt cop in Touch of Evil or Harry Lime in The Third Man? Each one has established its place in cinematic history, but it is Kane that he is most known for.
No list of the best films of the 20th century can be made without Citizen Kane in it. It is often in the top three greatest films of all time, and till recently was routinely cited by critics as the top film, till it was displaced by Vertigo. The list is of course heavily weighted towards Western films, but even so, anyone who has watched (and re-watched) Citizen Kane will agree with its greatness. It remains gripping and powerful even today.
Orson Welles was just 25 when he made it, and was a first-time director, having scored a big time success with his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, based on H.G. Wells’ novel, which spread panic in the US about the imminent attack by aliens. Welles asked for, and got, full freedom from the studio to make Citizen Kane the way he wanted to, without interference from executives, something that dogged him through his career.
The film received good critical reviews but did not do well at the box office. William Randolph Hearst, the powerful newspaper baron of the time, was convinced that Kane was based on him and banned all mention of the film in his publications and also went after Welles. Exhibitors refused to release the film and studio bosses too dithered till he threatened to sue them.
Over time, the film has won over many admirers, both critics and film buffs alike, but for Welles, it remained an albatross he could not shake off. “Citizen Kane is the greatest curse of my life”, he said; all his films were held up to it in comparison, an “impossible standard”. Welles felt burdened by it. He also had to give in to demands that the studio have the final say in every film from them on, and his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was reshot and re-edited while he was away shooting a documentary for the US government in Brazil.
His problems with studio bosses grew with each film – his image as a recalcitrant genius who often went over budget came in the way of getting finance and offers to direct. It isolated him from the Hollywood system.
The Netflix documentary, directed by Morgan Neville, tells the story of his effort to make a film where he would have full creative control. Welles set out to make The Other Side of the Wind in the 1970s, about an ageing director who directs one last film and invites his friends to a party hoping they will fund it. It looks at friendships, betrayal and death, as the director realises the world is crumbling around him and that no one is willing to support him. Welles insisted it was not about him, though it becomes clear as the documentary progresses, that there are many parallels.
While The Other Side of the Wind is being made, it is also being filmed by a documentary crew, a meta device that gets further enhanced by the current documentary, which has put together original footage from the film and interviewed many of the original crew and cast, telling the entire saga of the troubled project. The original’s film-within-a-film style, part black and white, part colour, is Welles’ satirical take on European avant-garde cinema of the time.
Orson Welles in 1941. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead – said to be a remark Welles had once made but which has never been verified too follows Welles’ style. Neville employs rapid cutting and uses disjointed quotes from various people without clarifying who they are are or even who exactly is speaking. The audience is expected to unravel the story, but as the film progresses, a cohesive narrative emerges and things become clearer.
Welles had then just returned from Europe – the second time he had gone into self-imposed exile – and over the years had acted in several, mainly indifferent, films as well as hosted television shows. But it was a film he wanted to make.
He began The Other Side of the Wind with his own money, then got in a European investor and finally an Iranian with close family ties to the Shah. An intermediary embezzled the funds, leaving Welles stranded. The film shooting went on and on, leaving all but Welles confused about what exactly was going on. No one knew the whole story – there was no script and often it used to be written on the day of the shoot. He tried to edit the film over the next few years, meanwhile working on outside assignments to earn a living.
In 1979, with the film only partially edited with the footage that had been shot, things changed when Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution overthrew the Shah. All the Shah’s business links were examined closely and Welles’ film project also came under the scanner. The film’s negatives were seized and kept in a vault in Paris, till the Iranians deemed them worthless, but then a legal battle between Welles’ daughter Belinda and his mistress Oja Kodar meant that the film could not be completed.
Welles died in 1985, his last dream project unfinished and many of his dreams unrealised – he continued working on several ideas and scripts but there was no one to support him. Hollywood had forgotten him, except to wheel him out once in a while to pay tributes – one scene shows him accepting an achievement award, where he shows clips from his unfinished film, hoping that someone will step forward with the last bit of finance; no one does. He is an icon, but for all practical purposes, a crumbling icon without contemporary relevance.
There is no bitterness or melancholy, but the documentary, with a running time of 122 minutes, reflects on lost fame; Welles continues to be his magnificent self, with a strong presence and the centre of attraction of an adoring band of followers, including the rising director Peter Bogdanovich, who plays a young mentee in The Other Side of the Wind. But the big man himself – morbidly obese and probably broke – becomes a shadow of his past self, living for free in Bogdanovich’s house and looking around for a bit of money to salvage his dream.
After nearly three decades of legal complications and several aborted tries, The Other Side of the Wind was finally completed and released in 2014. Critics have hailed it as one of Welles’ major works and it has a high approval rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes.
They’ll Love Me When I am Dead too has generally been appreciated, as an “entertaining window to the creative process – and late period professional travails – of a brilliant filmmaker”. For Welles fans, this documentary will invoke memories of just how brilliant he was.
The six-part series examines the clash of cultures – the fear of the ‘other’ – in fine detail.
The difference between a religion and a cult is a matter of scale. A religion is a marriage; a cult is an affair. A new Netflix documentary series, Wild Wild Country, is about a particularly tumultuous affair – one that lasted four years but aspired for permanence – between the spiritual leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers, in Oregon. Like most successful romances, this relationship too was built on Folie à deux, or the Folly of Two, a psychiatric condition where the delusion of one partner is transmitted to the other.
But there was one key difference – thousands shared that delusion in Rajneeshpuram, a commune established by Rajneesh’s followers in Oregon’s Wasco County in the early ’80s. And nothing was out of bounds for them – neither immigration fraud nor mass poisoning or attempted murders.
The potential for drama here is immense, evoking a famous Leo Tolstoy line, “All great literature is one of the two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
But there’s a third kind of story too, where a man embarking on a journey becomes a stranger in a town. In 1981, before the first batch of strangers arrived in red robes, buying a 64,000-acre ranch and spending $125 million to develop a utopian commune, Oregon’s Antelope wasn’t even a town — it was populated by 40 people anticipating a quiet retirement. If they were enjoying the sunset, then the Rajneeshees were blinded by the light, an unending beacon of Truth that kept them enchanted and addicted.
Directed by Maclain Way and Chapman Way, Wild West Country tells its story from three points of view: from the people of Antelope who were first intrigued and, later, baffled and scared by the Rajneeshees; and the two sets of Rajneeshees, the ones who remained loyal to Bhagwan (his attorney and Rajneeshpuram’s mayor, Swami Prem Niren (Philip Toelkes) and the ones who broke out (Rajneesh’s fiery personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, and her trusted aide, Ma Shanti B (Jane Stork). Each individual in this motley ensemble can stand on their own; their triumphs, loss, and realisations are personal. One also completes the other — they’re friends, foes, foils, each imbuing the documentary with a unique energy and poignancy, a bundle of swirling, scary contradictions.
Take, for instance, easily the most fascinating character in the piece, Sheela, who, now in her 60s, speaks in an almost hypnotic, musical tone. A leader with a petty dictatorial streak, who was known for being haughty and remorseless, Sheela is an arresting presence. So is Niren, a headstrong lawyer from Seattle who left his world to join Rajneesh’s, first in Pune and later in Oregon. Even years later, he retains his persuasive skills as a lawyer, defending Rajneesh, commune, and their decisions at every step. Then there are the people of Antelope (the documentary focuses on three residents) — relatively calm and quiet, as compared to Sheela and Niren, who recall the days of Rajneeshees with horror and (latent) anger, a time when their pastoral middle-class propriety was severely challenged.
The Way brothers structure this six-part series first as an unlikely love story – between Rajneesh and his devotees – and later, when things take a darker, sinister turn, as a thriller. At each step they’re helped by their eloquent subjects who cast moments of unexpected beauty and terror.
When Rajneesh first arrived at the commune, built over several months with care and ingenuity, replete with dams and meditation centres and townhouses, he was given a grand welcome. He was received in a Rolls Royce; 4,000 square feet of green lawn carpets were rolled out around his house; some devotees played sitar. We see the old footage of the reception, but it is Sheela’s words that stay with us, “It was like a beautiful Fellini movie.” Or when Niren, who otherwise seems rational and clear-headed, dismisses the critique of commune with a loud laugh preceded by, “There’s a darkness in everyone — doesn’t make you a bad person”.
Even though Wild Wild Country is a documentary, made possible by its protagonists’ recollections, the filmmakers use the finest techniques of a fictional feature — an immersive sound design, a clever juxtaposition of images (splicing current interviews with old footage), apposite lighting that reflects the subjects’ current mindscapes (Niren, for instance, is shot in soft, warm light, foreshadowing his vulnerability, while the residents of Antelope are filmed in bright, white light, indicating their status of eventual victors) — that lends this piece a textured, atmospheric quality.
At times, the cinematic embellishments are needlessly ramped up, both in terms of sound design (for example, when Sheela says “pin drop silence” in a scene you can literally hear the sound of a pin drop) or dramatic reconstruction (when we find that John Silvertooth, one of the Antelope residents, was spying on the Rajneeshees, the camera films his walk in slow-motion from behind). But these silly bursts of ambition are so minor that they don’t impinge on the overall experience.
Besides, the film isn’t interested in finding new narrative trails. It is a faithful retelling of Rajneeshees in Oregon, nothing that can’t be gleaned from a series of newspaper articles or books. But Wild Wild Country is interested in bigger — and better — truths. It not just shows how the Rajneeshees tried taking over the Wasco County (by exploiting the loopholes in the law and using coercive means), but also poses a more difficult and unanticipated question, burning with relevance in Trump’s America, that demands our attention: Were the Antelope residents naturally opposed to assimilation? Were they, to put it in harsher terms, xenophobes? There are obviously no clear answers but some stray hints.
Rajneeshees turned out to be dangerous, but what if they weren’t – what if they had just kept to themselves? Wild Wild Country examines the clash of cultures – the fear of the ‘other’ – in fine detail. At one point, we learn that Sheela, in a bid to influence the outcome of Wasco elections, promised food and shelter to homeless Americas in different states who moved to Oregon in large numbers. Silvertooth remembers that incident, smiles, and says, “It was a magnet for crazy people”. But is being homeless the same as being “crazy”?
By incorporating different points of view, Wild Wild Country also asks us another fundamental question: Do human beings secretly crave subservience? When Sheela becomes increasingly autocratic — breaking laws, imposing rules — even the powerful Rajneeshees keep quiet. There are moments in the documentary that remind you of the German Drama Das Experiment, based on the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which showed the effects of perceived power and how it can quash individual agency. The fascist and communist regimes provide another parallel in the real world; so do the collective indifference of the Indian middle-class to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule.
Intricately tied to that is the inadequacy and routineness and absurdity of everyday life, a malaise that makes people over compensate in strange ways. Some find solace in drugs, some become travellers, some create art, some surrender their bank accounts and lives to godmen or gods. Out of the several exit options, excessive devotion is the most acceptable. And it is so because it is laced with the most obvious and recognisable form of love, legitimising the latent insanity of the masses. (Surely most of us remember that September afternoon, in 1995, when an entire nation was convinced that Lord Ganesh had begun drinking milk?)
But the most spellbinding aspect of Wild Wild Country is not its ideas but its people. The followers of Rajneesh weren’t outcasts of society. They were educated, aware, and rich — they chose to stay. And even decades later, when the rush and intoxication of love have faded, they’re still held in its sway. When Niren talks about how Bhagwan was treated by the U.S. police officials, paraded from one prison to another, his voice cracks and the tears follow involuntarily. Out of all the people in this world, there’s one kind who cannot be broken or persuaded or reasoned with: the ones who believe in their lies.
Similarly, Rajneesh discredited Sheela, tried everything to destroy her, and yet, when she talks about Bhagwan, her eyes light up. Her house still contains framed portraits of Rajneesh. Sheela exhibits no empathy, no remorse for her past actions, but when she talks about Bhagwan and their fallout, her cold façade crumbles — a cellar inaccessible to everyone else, a core that retains the innocence of a girl.
History doesn’t remember the Rajneeshees kindly — and for a good reason. Yet while watching Wild Wild Country, especially in parts where they’re enjoying moments of bliss while building a world from scratch, hoping that their otherwise mundane lives can have meanings, it’s difficult to not feel envious of them. That no matter what their eventual fates came to be, they at least experienced — in whatever bizarre and twisted ways — something most long an entire lifetime for: acceptance and love.
