Peter Wintonick is a Canadian producer-director, and co-creator of the Golden Conch award-winner (ex-aqueo) at the 1994 edition of MIFF, “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomksy and the Media”. He was last in Mumbai as Chair of the National Jury at MIFF 2002 and hopes to return to MIFF 2004.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media created ripples all over the world. Was this great film a great commercial success too? Do you think a genre called commercial documentary‚ is possible or viable or desirable? What category would you assign to the films dished out by the channels like Discovery, National Geographic and Animal Planet?

Manufacturing Consent was a popular, populist, critical, commercial and educational hit. There are several such feature length doccies every year rising to the fore in all parts of the world. Increasingly, average people are becoming distrustful of what the mainstream media and their governments are telling them. They want alternative sources of information to balance the sources, to make up their own minds. Documentary provides this. Eventually there will be less and less need for vapid fiction. We will be able to get all the pleasure, drama, humour, characters and stories we currently derive from fiction out of our non-fiction films. Sure, there will always be Bollywood and Hollywood, Tamil-language films and Indywood, but documentaries are on the march. So, without pandering to audiences and base taste, commercial doc is viable and desirable.

Please define a documentary.

A documentary is the creative treatment of reality, as Grierson once said. But it also has as many definitions as there are non-fiction practitioners. From Verité to essay, from current affairs to investigative, from experimental to docudrama, from confusion to fusion, from faction to fiction, from the pedantic to the poetic, we can use all strategies, all the colours in our artists’ palettes, add all our imaginative dream waters to the rainbow river, to build the new skyscrapers of the new documentary edifice, to define documentary for ourselves, our communities, our culture. It is the ‘truth’ as you, the filmmaker, sees it.

Q. Is documentary filmmaking still a movement in America or is it a thriving profession with funding and marketing opportunities?

In North America and in Europe, documentary is a profession and a confession, a belief system, a vow of poverty, an art form, and concurrently, a crass commercial and highly viable economic subset of the communications industry. There has never been a better time to be working in documentary. For the past year or so I have been traveling and unraveling the world. Lately, after my last visit to Bombay I have experienced a global view. From Adelaide to Vancouver. The AIDC (Australian International Doc Conference) and the mother of all fests, IDFA in Amsterdam. To Hot Docs in Sarsghanistan. From Banff to Barcelona. Winging from Prague’s One World Fest, to fiestas in Buenos Aires, Thessalonica and London and Marseilles. I’ve flown from the ridiculous to the sublime: Bill Clinton gave us the Abraham prize at the Hamptons Festival for SEEING is BELIEVING. But I will never forget the shock and awe of a thing called hope, which I recently experienced moderating pitches from emerging filmmakers in Southern Africa.

Q. Do you accept the division between art or new wave‚ cinema and commercial cinema? Can the film media survive without commerce‚?

Well, whether you call what we make a doccie, a doco, a hot doc, factual tele tales or factional agitprops-prop; wherever you live in the real world, it’s clear that there are certain similarities of practice and “product” which bind us all visually together. I think audiences care little for the distinction between art, new wave and commercial cinema. Between documentary and fiction. They want great, real stories - well told. Marketers and broadcasters and empty headed journalists and gossip mongers may want vacuum media, but even they can learn from audiences, and in these tough times, it is their social responsibility too.

Q. What is the future of the short fiction genre?

Well, that’s a good example. Ten years ago they said the short form was dead. But now, thanks to internet distribution, music television, short attention spans of our teens, a preference for the form is being reborn. In festivals the world over the programmes of short fiction and short docs are the most well- attended. Now, I personally feel that the short form is the hardest form to master, which is why all my films are too long! But for developing a language and a movement and for teaching emerging filmmakers about their art and craft, there is nothing like the short form.

Now about Films Division and the documentary movement in India. Do you think FD has made any significant contribution? Please evaluate FD as the organiser of MIFF and as a documentary filmmaking agency.

When I last walked up to the Films Division campus, home to MIFF, I stopped at a street-corner stand where a few young men were selling newspapers. I was totally AMAZED that they were selling more than 30 different daily newspapers in a multitude of languages, a post-Babylonic masala mix, each with their own brightly coloured mast-head logos, their own shades of styles, their own rainbow of politics, ideas, contents and discontents. There were even six or seven English-language newspapers. “What an incredibly rich and diverse and democratic country,” I proclaimed to the newspaper-sellers.
As I continued my walk, and reached the cinematic oasis of the Films Division on Peddar Road, I wondered aloud to the palm trees about the future of MIFF and the Films Division in a world gone increasingly corporate. They are, I concluded, organizations, which should always be supported. I wondered, in a globalised world where the French are learning to protect their own cultures from imperial invasion, what ever happened to those great Indian social policies which protected the social space and public media? So why should filmmakers from different parts of the world support public media and its institutions, not just in India but everywhere? Why? Because The Films Division makes more than 50 films a year and many more informational programs. The FD has more than 8000 titles of its past productions in its archives and is a true preservation of Indian cultural visual history. My hero, Mahatma, is somehow embodied within the spirit, which helped create the Films Division.

Q. You have been a most familiar presence in most of the MIFFs. How do you view its growth over the years?

Now, I have been to the Bombay/Mumbai International Film Festival four times and have seen its incredible growth and maturity. In my humble opinion, the work of the festival’s organizers, and the incredibly hard-working Films Division workers who are the festivals engines, and who toil throughout the year to make it happen, deserves to be applauded and supported for its increasing professionalism. The fest gets better and better with each new edition, it exposes a larger and larger public to views of India, and the world, which it would not normally get through the mainstream. The films offer hope and imaginative solutions to the problems, which beset the world. MIFF now its to the point where it is the most important festival of its kind in Asia, second only to Japan’s Yamagata Festival which thinks so much of MIFF as to have its representatives there. As do the filmmaking governments, institutions and filmmakers from more than 36 countries who were represented at MIFF 2002.
I have also watched with glee, the independent sector, encouraged by having MIFF as a platform, develop from producing only a few good celluloid-based well-intentioned campaigner’s films to a point today where there is a virtual explosion of many great individual works of creativity and social consciousness, mostly based on the new portable digital technologies. MIFF and The FD and of course the independent and non-governmental documentary communities, are very, very valuable sources of public education. They should not be bulldozed into the neo-liberal nor conservative fundamentalist dust. That makes no cultural or economic sense, in the long run.
Does anyone really think that Rupert Murdoch and his ilk really care a twiddle about documentary or educating the Indian masses? Or if they do, it is only about educating people to consume and consume and consume, in ignorance? Does this honour the time-tested spirit of documentary and democracy? Do the private enterprisers really care about people and children and media literacy? About conveying true information about health? And if the world public media institutions are allowed to perish, what will be the next public institution to go? The public hospitals? The public education system? The police force? The Fire fighers? The Roads? The Sidewalks? The holy rivers? The water supply? The air? The Earth? It seems to me that India is a country where Gandhi imagined a metaphor for self-sufficiency as embodied by the small cotton handloom-spinning machine as an instrument for liberation and self-sufficiency. Similarly, I can envision that the new small digital technologies and the video handicams that are the tools of the new revolution are the 21st century version of those spinning wheels. But who will there be to spin out the new stories and the new tales of the new India, if there are not public institutions and the government supported film institutes, schools and training centres? Who will sing, and record India’s song?

Please tell our viewers about your present projects and your plans for MIFF 2004.

I would love to return to MIFF 2004 with my new film, made with co-director Katerina Cizek. It is called SEEING is BELIEVING : Handicams, Human Rights and The News. It may have been inspired somewhat by what I have seen as a developing trend in India over the years and in the documentary world…. It’s a phenomenon where ‘amateurs’ and video activists and human rights campaigners are picking up the tools of the next visual revolution - the handicams, and are helping to transform journalism, international law and human rights work in very important ways. These new tools may be the most important tools since the industrial revolution. We shot last year with some very brave people in the Philippines and around the world.
As well, I would also like to suggest I bring a few top-notch Canadian docos, and a programme of international winners to MIFF. Of course, I am shooting new films, and one with Australian filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke will feature simple portraits of grass-roots activists. The World Social Forum next year in India, might provide a backdrop for that.

Interviewed by CHINMAY CHAKRAVARTY 6/6/03