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ZURICH 2024

Critique : Marching in the Dark

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- Dans ce documentaire, Kinshuk Surjan se penche avec empathie sur la question du deuil ainsi que sur ses rudes conséquences financières et son impact psychologique durable

Critique : Marching in the Dark

Cet article est disponible en anglais.

In the last 20 years, over 400,000 women farmers have lost their husbands to suicide – so reads the opening title card of Marching in the Dark, a heart-rending documentary shot in Maharashtra, India. The film has just won a Special Mention at the Zurich Film Festival (see the news) and has been selected for the European Film Awards (see the news).

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With his feature-length debut, Kinshuk Surjan takes an empathetic look at loss: both its dire economic consequences and its traumatic debris. The Brussels-based Indian director has already been exploring the precarity of peasant families in India through his doctoral research, but his documentary practice leads him to observe the process of grief and to stay close to one young widow. Sanjivani (Sanjivani Bhure) is at the centre of the film, and we meet her in the aftermath of her late husband’s suicide – a tragic end that he chose for himself, unable to deal with the crop failures, market prices and debts. His case is one of thousands each year, and Sanjivani is one of those thousands of widows, but Surjan is cautious enough to keep the personal and the collective experience of this tragedy from merging with one another. In fact, the film’s observational approach never feels distant; it’s just the right amount of formal restraint to allow the wound to breathe.

Sanjivani and her two children become part of her brother-in-law’s family and, by extension, of his demands. She is also a homemaker and farm worker, but bearing the stigma of widowhood in the community prevents her, like it does for others, from achieving self-actualisation. However, there is a community within the community – a support group for widows – that can help these women come together for one another and for themselves. Marching in the Dark is unflinching in the way the camera stays with those women in their one-on-one meetings and during the group sessions where, one after the other, they speak about how carrying this trauma actually feels. It’s in the articulation of it all, as well as in the uninterrupted, long takes in close-up, that the viewer, together with Sanjivani, can unearth hope.

Sharing grief is never straightforward or easy. In fact, Sanjivani doesn’t speak for the longest time in those meetings, but this is the true calling of documentary filmmaking – to capture the passage of time not only in frames per second, but also in the invisible emotional processes at work. Surjan’s attentive presence makes the viewer privy to pain in all its fluctuations, whether they are voiced out loud or not, but it also traces the scars left by the systemic problems that plague agriculture today, especially in India. The ripple effects of capitalism and neoliberalism are costing more lives than one dares to admit, and while the price of rebuilding one’s life as a widow cannot be measured, it can lead the march in the dark.

Marching in the Dark was produced by Belgium’s Clin d’oeil Films, in co-production with Amsterdam-based SNG Film and India’s NoCut Film Collective. Lightdox handles its world sales.

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(Traduit de l'anglais)

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