While the news about the 2022 Oscars was dominated with a trivial celebrity feud, we would like to get your attention back to documentary filmmaker Rintu Thomas and Khabar Lahariya chief reporter Meera Devi.
The gritty narrative of the docu feature film “Writing With Fire” chronicles the rise of rural media collective Khabar Lahariya that is run by Dalit women.
The Oscar nominated film was co-directed by Sushmit Ghosh and follows the digital transformation of the Hindi language newspaper started in 2002 in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The film cleverly follows the lives and work of these Dalit women reporters who are considered untouchables and fight an archaic caste-battle which still exists in modern India. But nothing deters their spirit of reporting.
Though the documentary ‘Summer Of Soul’ won the category, Rintu and team are pleased with getting nominated and said, "As the first Indian feature documentary to be nominated, we are quite sure this has opened many doors for the Indian filmmaking community."
