Nero‘s Guests

Over the past 10 years, more than 200,000 farmers in India have committed suicide. This drama has had a huge impact on the rural community, but the matter is not being taken up by the authorities or the media. Journalist P. Sainath makes it his business to increase awareness of the fate of the victims (both the farmers and their families) by publishing their stories in the daily newspaper The Hindu. This is unusual, because "Not a single newspaper in this country has a correspondent working full time on poverty." In other words, in the eyes of the Indian elite, 70% of the Indian population is not newsworthy. Such overwhelming poverty is apparently too confronting for the readership. "Is it a sin to be a farmer?" asks one destitute man in desperation. Sainath uses the suicides to address the issue of the huge wealth disparity in India. Filmmaker Deepa Bhatia follows him from indigent farming families to well-attended lectures. Between times, Sainath speaks directly to the camera in this fluidly edited documentary (director Bhatia is also a Bollywood film editor). The driven and well-informed journalist repeatedly exposes the distressing lack of social justice in India and the hypocrisy of neoliberalism. He paraphrases Tacitus for his somewhat apathetic highly-educated audience: Nero burned prisoners to provide light at night. His guests stood alongside and watched. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)