Saw this at the Rotterdam filmfestival (IFFR) 2023. Though the director insists it is not a documentary, due to the many personal stories included, this movie shows very intensely and very close to the skin how volunteers took care (food, water, medical etc) for migrants and other underprivileged people, contrary to the government who left them to their own devices and apparently did nothing to alleviate their needs. I understood that even the public media (TV, newspapers) were silent around Covid, and left the average citizen puzzled what was going on, unknowing how to protect themselves. But even proper instructions fail in the densely populated slums.
When asked, I assume that officials will insist that the footage paints a one-sided picture and leaves out what they really did for the people (unsure in which fields they performed better). They will also maintain that Covid was so new and unknown how to handle, that they felt abandoned by science, without answers or remedies. In other words, they were taken by surprise and could not have done better than they actually did.
The conditions under which the filmmakers collected this footage are daunting, a burden for those (mostly 2, sometimes 3) who made the effort anyway. The near-intimate approach of their subjects cannot be dealt with easily, thereby ignoring the risks for themselves to be infected. It is also difficult for them to keep an emotional distance under these circumstances, and not keep pondering about it afterwards. The interviews with several key people seem very calm despite being in the middle of the pandemic. The way they entered and filmed slums and crowds was very confrontational, something that even I felt on a safe distance.
All in all, a very-close view on India struggling during a particularly bad time, with great emphasis on the have-not's and almost devoid of official talking heads, the latter invisible in the documentary just as they apparently were invisible during the pandemic. I scored 5 out of 5 for the audience award after the screening.
