The film deals with sensitive subject of a 13-year old’s gang rape
VANCOUVER: The award-winning feature documentary TO KILL A TIGER, directed by Nisha Pahuja will mark its B.C. Premiere at the 2023 Victoria Film Festival (Feb 3-12).
Shot on location in Jharkhand, India, this 125 minute documentary will be joined by three National Film Board of Canada (NFB) co productions: Vancouver filmmaker Lori Lozinski’s short doc A Motorcycle Saved My Life, Brian D. Johnson’s The Colour of Ink (Sphinx Productions/NFB), and Patricio Henriquez and Luc Côté’s Waiting for Raif (Macumba Média/NFB).
In a small Indian village, Ranjit wakes up to find that his 13-year-old daughter has not returned from a family wedding. A few hours later, she’s found stumbling home. After being dragged into the woods, she was raped by three men. Ranjit goes to the police, and the men are arrested. But Ranjit’s relief is short-lived, as the villagers and their leaders launch a sustained campaign to force the family to drop the charges.
A cinematic documentary, To Kill a Tiger follows Ranjit’s uphill battle to find justice for his child.
In India, where a rape is reported every 20 minutes and conviction rates are less than 30 percent, Ranjit’s decision to support his daughter is virtually unheard of.
With tremendous access, we witness the emotional journey of an ordinary man facing extraordinary circumstances. A father whose love for his daughter forces a social reckoning that will reverberate for years to come.
The film is winner of the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Inspiring Voices and Perspectives Feature Film Award at the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival.
Nisha Pahuja is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in Toronto and Bombay, whose credits include Diamond Road (2007 Gemini Award for Best Documentary Series) and The World Before Her (2012; Best Documentary, Tribeca; Best Canadian Documentary, Hot Docs; Canada’s Top Ten).
Talking about the film, Pahuja said that this started off as an entirely different film. “That film, called Send Us Your Brother, was a more pointed and direct exploration of Indian masculinity. The focus of the original work was Mahendra Kumar, the women’s rights activist who has a key, albeit minor, role in To Kill a Tiger.”
Mahendra was leading a large-scale program in Jharkhand, where he and other activists worked with men and boys to change their ideas on gender. One of the men enrolled in that program was Ranjit.
As Ranjit’s story unfolded, Pahuja began to feel that his odyssey could serve as the spine of the film, and that Mahendra’s work and his personal life would add a larger context. Particularly compelling was the impact his work was having on two young boys—Ashish and Karan.
“These storylines, with their own inherent richness and complexity, were meant to decode the “why” behind the tragic rape at the centre of the film—a rape echoed over and over again in headlines that continually and numbingly come out of India. It’s a “why” that I’ve been grappling with as a filmmaker for over a decade. To understand how men and boys are created, specifically in Indian culture, was a way for me to cast light into shadows,” she said.
To Kill a Tiger took eight years to make. “It represents the amalgamation of many people’s creative talents and commitment to the story—composer Jonathan Goldsmith, Music editor Jordan Kawai, assistant editor Pranay Nichani, story editor Manfred Becker, Executive Producer Anita Lee and Producers David Oppenheim and the formidable Cornelia Principe,” Pahuja added.
