Appeal to All Documentary Filmmakers of India to Boycott IDFFB, Orissa

On 2nd January 2006, 14 Adivasi men, women and children were shot dead by the police in order to carry out illegal construction activities for Tata Steel in Kalinga Nagar, Odisha. Instead of justice being delivered to the Adivasi people of Kalinga Nagar, a reign of terror ensued that cordoned off villages from the rest of the world imposing a blockade of essential services like health and education. Several people were incarcerated, tortured, assassinated by the mafia and by 2010 whole villages were being pillaged by hordes of paramilitary and mafia. Finally, Tata managed to forcefully evict all the people from their land and set up the factory.

Twelve years after the massacre of Adivasi people for Tata in Kalinga Nagar justice is yet to be delivered. The P. K. Mohanty judicial commission investigating the matter concluded that the police was not be blamed for the massacre. Even today many Adivasi people of Kalinga Nagar fight against Tata for its forceful land acquisition and are blatantly intimidated by Tata's officials. In the last one year as Tata scales up its production capacity, it has been razing down more adivasi dwellings and encroaching forest land. Many Adivasi people have even filed a petition in the National Green Tribunal.

One of the ways Tata managed to do so was by spending huge funds on NGOs and Media through the Tata Trusts, and thereby spreading misinformation and silencing several media outlets. One such organization that has been channeling Tata Trusts funds is the India Foundation for Arts based in Bangalore. Now the India Foundation for the Arts and the Film Society of Bhubaneswar are holding an event titled 'Indian Documentary Film Festival of Bhubaneswar - IDFFB' and even claims itself as 'the biggest documentary film festival of Odisha'.

There are documentary filmmakers, activists, writers, ordinary citizens who have been engaged for the last fifteen years in making documentary films that reveal the truth about the violent land grab from the Adivasi people of Odisha by companies like Tata and Vedanta. We know this festival is an attempt to shift the focus from documentaries that expose the worst atrocities being committed by the Tatas and Vedantas.

The violent assault on Adivasi life and land by companies like Tata is normalised by their carefully crafted image of benevolence by such lavish patronage of the Arts as is evident from the activities of IFA. A criminal corporation responsible for Adivasi massacre in Odisha and civil war in Chattisgarh is now a respectable name that several artists proudly flaunt in their profiles and biographies. This is the other side of fascism, the one that patronized and promotes the Arts, Sports and such. If this remains unquestioned and unprotected then our silence ends becomes complicit in the crimes of corporations like Tata as our silence is what companies like Tata want while they continue to plunder Adivasi land and life.

We appeal to all documentary filmmakers of India to boycott this event as it defeats the very purpose of the medium of the documentary film which is essentially a medium built on the foundation stone of ethics and one that is essentially a quest to uncover truth. This festival is clearly a renewed attempt by the cultural mafia of Bhubaneswar that backs the mining mafia with their hundreds of events throughout the year that keeps the news from Kalinga Nagar and Niyamgiri subdued under their din and noise. Moreover, the festival's organizers are the Film Society of Bhubaneswar who have done the same in the past by organizing a Vedanta sponsored film festival at a time the company was at its peak of violations of Adivasi people's rights and environmental disorder. But we made an appeal to the filmmaking community and there was widespread boycott which strengthened the movement against Vedanta.

Please sign this boycott appeal as an endorsement of the boycott and register your protest against the whitewashing of corporate crimes as well as the appropriation of the documentary medium.

Signed
Surya Shankar, Documentary Filmmaker, Saurabh Kumar, Documentary Filmmaker, Pratik Parmar, Documentary Filmmaker, Soumya Ranjan Mallick, Cinematographer, Lenin Kumar, Poet, Ranjana Padhi, Activist, Ananta Prasad, Activist,