New Delhi: BBC World Services’ YouTube channel is out with a new documentary. The two part series titled ‘The Killing Call’ follows the journey of influential Punjabi singer Sidhu Moose Wala; his early life, music journey, connections to gangs, and eventual death.
While the makers of the documentary were reportedly urged by Sidhu Moose Wala’s parents to not release the documentary, they decided to go on with their decision and have uploaded it on YouTube. Since then the documentary has ignited a storm of opinion, be it on the veracity of facts established in it, the journalistic integrity of the endeavour, but mostly of many interesting ‘never seen before’ elements of the Sidhu Moose Wala killing that the documentary claims to bring to light.
Reality is stranger than fiction, but when someone tries to fictionalise reality for the sake of narrative purposes, the result is not just strange but false. This problem is at the root of most documentaries today, which proclaim showing the ‘truth’ but use tools whose inherent function is to enable falsity.
Jean-Luc Godard, who revolutionised cinema during the French New Wave with his innovative film style once said, “Cinema is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.” It is this dichotomy which is at the heart of the BBC Sidhu Moose Wala documentary. Surely it is entertaining, engrossing, revealing and more, but it does not deliver what it promises, a ‘documentary’.
The film delivers all its major punches through editing. It is through editing that it tells a story, which if it was not for smart editing, would quickly fall flat on its feet. It is through voice overs, footage inserts and ‘interviews’ that the film presents ‘its’ truth.
Here it falls into the trap that most mainstream documentary makers fall in, sacrificing facts for storytelling. In its stead we have good visuals, transitions and voice overs. Good imagery substitutes credible journalistic legwork. We see a lot of statements being passed off as facts in this documentary.
A lot of ‘voices’ are from actors, pronouncing revealing statements unsourced and unverified. The audience might miss this as it will be entranced that by whatever means, ‘secrets’ and ‘exclusive’ information at least seems to be coming out. This is what happens in The Killing Call, with Sidhu in absentia, the facts of his life are snatched and then placed on a well lit plate to be served to fans eager for new information pertaining to their favourite pop star.
Another element the documentary smartly uses is that when talking about major events like student politics in Punjab or farmer protests in Delhi, it introduces various experts and established journalists.
Unlike in the story of Moose Wala which is personal and actually needs corroboration but is presented only by ‘voices’, the publicly known events are told with credibility. This puts the veneer of respectability on the whole endeavour and audiences think the whole film was one presented by ‘experts’, and not fragmentary, well edited ‘voices’.
While the intent of the documentary might have been to entertain, a major risk it carries is spreading disinformation and is a risk to the legacy of Sidhu Moose Wala. The dramatisation of violence and crime, similar to what Sidhu Moose Wala was sometimes accused of, often ends up only in glamorising it. It is not too hard to see why Sidhu Moose Wala’s parents objected to the release of this ‘documentary’.
