After one of Japan ‘s largest television networks, NHK, aired a package of seven Indian documentary films recently, the lack of a similar platform in India is the common gripe among the participating filmmakers. Why, after all, should Japan be interested in knowing about Kolkata’s College Street even as there are no takers for his film among Indian television channels, wonders Tirthankar Dasgupta.

Dasgupta’s film, Barno Porichoy, takes an unabashed look at Kolkata’s book district and presents College Street as a personal dreamscape, where literary, political and academic aspirations meet, interact, mature or perish. It’s an individualistic take on a stretch of road, which reached drawing rooms in Japan in September-end. The only way Barno Porichoy can reach the audience it involves, says Dasgupta, is through private screenings. “The big difference between most developed countries and India is that whereas documentary films run parallel to mainstream entertainment there, in India it is either seen as activism or as a luxury. Most channels there have dedicated time slots for documentaries, whereas serials dominate the fare in Indian channels and there is no space for alternative thoughts,” complains Dasgupta.

The initiative of NHK, also known as Japan Broadcasting Corporation, was primarily aimed at commissioned films that take a look at contemporary India, both rural and urban, through the prism of the vast changes sweeping through India. With the Kolkata-based Satyajit Ray Television and Film Institute’s (SRFTI) cooperation, many of the selected films chronicle change from a rooted and personal point of view. “I believe it’s because they wanted to see India beyond images of progress, poverty and culture. They were looking for ideas that represented other emerging facets,” says filmmaker Bharath Murthy.

Murthy’s film, also part of the NHK package, The Jasmine of Mysore, represented one such facet: the emergence of amateur, self-filmed pornography and the coming of age of the voyeur in India. The film took off from a well-publicised incident in Karnataka, when a self-made film (Mysore Mallige ) by two lovers got leaked, gained cult popularity among a section of the population, and also gave rise to speculations and rumours. Attempting to retrace the route taken by the key players of the incident, including the couple, the editor of the magazine that ‘broke’ the news and young viewers, his film, claims Murthy, chronicles a phenomenon of modern Indian society. “If Bangalore is known internationally as an IT hub, this is its underbelly. It is equally true that foreign commissioning editors of documentary films flock here because in India they find excellent subjects and ideas that do not have a platform,” he adds.

Through the Ground Glass, Subhadeep Ghosh’s film on Basanti Devi, a lady from a remote corner of Jharkhand’s Dumka district trying to break the hierarchical-feudal shackles of heartland India, and Sudipta Bhowmick’s Shadows of Forgotten Melodies, a film on Anindita, a young member of North Bengal’s Rajbongshi community who is torn between her fondness for mainstream popular entertainment and her community’s expectation of her carrying the torch of a long tradition in folk music, were two other films that were screened.

The local flavour in the package is further underlined through Anirban Dutta’s film, Chronicle of an Amnesiac. With Kolkata forming the backdrop, it is a film that takes a fond look at characters ‘who are in the process of disappearing into the domain of amnesia’. There is Pradip Chatterjee, a collector of abstract street sounds, the 92-year-old disillusioned Communist who has seen and gone through the tumult of change, and the monkey man, whose business has fallen foul with changed laws - all representing a culture that is getting morphed by shifting times. “I don’t think the film would have made it to any Indian television channel,” admits the filmmaker.

The film, Jodi Brishti Ashey (If It Rains), is not only about following three generations of a Sikkimese family, but also comes as a testament of its maker Nilanjan Bhattacharya’s attachment with the subject. Shot over nine years, the film, through different phases, weaves in the tale of an elderly Lama renowned as a rainmaker in the region, his son, well-known as a mask-maker but with a pronounced inclination towards gambling, and the Lama’s grandson, under societal pressure to learn the patriarch’s rainmaking skills even as Sikkim is shown gradually wilting to the charms of change. Other than a recently-launched 30 minute slot on a national news channel, none of these documentary films have an outside chance to make it to a pan-India screening platform.