Indian film Writing With Fire lost to Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) in the best documentary feature category at the 94th Academy Awards.
Writing With Fire is the first Indian feature documentary to be nominated for the Oscars. The documentary which chronicled the story of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only women-led rural newspaper, is created by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh.
The Khabar Lahariya team recently issued a statement about the way they were represented in the documentary. "The film is a moving and powerful document, but its presentation of Khabar Lahariya as an organisation with a particular and consuming focus of reporting on one party and the mobilisation around this, is inaccurate,” they said in a statement last week.
Summer Of Soul (Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is directed by the Roots frontman Ahmir Thompson, best known by his stage name Questlove.
For the film, Thompson arranged the never-seen-before archival footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival, celebrating African American music and culture, and promoting Black pride and unity, attended by 300,000 people in the summer of 1969. It was a festival favourite winning both the grand jury and audience awards in the US Documentary Competition category at the Sundance Film Festival 2021.
-with PTI inputs