- To Kill a Tiger
- 2022
- Documentary
- TV-MA • 2h 8m
To Kill A Tiger is a film about a 13-year old girl who is brutally gang-raped in rural India but refuses to yield to social custom. Instead, with the help of her loving father, she seeks justice. In the process she may very well contribute to significant social change.
To Kill A Tiger, unlike last week’s film Four Daughters, is a true “talking heads” documentary. There are no re-enactments and no professional actors in this film. Intermixed with some beautiful landscape scenes of rural India, the “action” is exclusively people talking and feeling about what has happened and what may yet occur.
The story revolves around two people, a thirteen-year-old girl who goes by the name Kiran in the movie (to protect her privacy), and her father, Ranjit. He is a rice farmer, and they live in a small rural village in India. Early on we hear Kiran tell the story of how she was brutally gang-raped and beaten after attending a local wedding. Locked into centuries of local customs, crimes like this are almost always handled “locally” and usually involve the girl marrying her rapist, rather than even report the crime, and by doing so she removes “the stain on her character.”
What makes this event different is that Kiran has no intention of marrying one of the boys and, because of her strength, her father, Ranjit, supports her. The filming starts after the crime has been “investigated” by local authorities and, instead of yielding to village custom, Ranjit files an official report and the case goes to trial. They are supported by a regional social justice foundation, the Srijan Foundation, and an independent film crew assembles to document what happens.
What To Kill A Tiger documents are the courage and conviction of the daughter and father, but also the strength of cultural tradition and how the maintenance of social behavior is strongly regulated by the enforcement of norms and customs. It also gives insight into how such norms and customs can be changed, although it involves enormous work and no small amount of risk.
The strength of this documentary is in how fluidly it simply records the conversations, feelings, and facial expressions of the key players as these events unfold. I didn’t see any attempt at editorializing, and I don’t even remember a narrator (there are some factual printed statements at the beginning and end), but the movie tells this powerful story entirely by the strength of its camera work and the skillful editing. At a little over two hours long, it could have been slightly shorter without sacrificing effect, but the viewer is presented with such powerful statements and honest opinions that you feel like you are a witness to these amazing events. It is also true, as pointed out by several viewer comments, that the film will make you angry, not at the filmmakers, but at some of the people opposing the courageous family. It also, though, makes you feel pride that for a couple of hours, you got to know something about these two people. That is the strength of the film and the reason to see it.
To Kill A Tiger reminds me of two other documentaries for very different reasons. The first is Writing With Fire which tells the story, also in India, of forty women, all members of the Dalit, or untouchable caste, who, using little more than their cell phones, create and publish a newspaper focusing on the injustices and abuses that their region absorbs as a result of behaviors from those above them, which is just about everyone. Like this one, that movie tells a story of women making significant changes in the Indian social system with courage and conviction, as well as some serious setbacks. These women, like Kiran, show that it might just be the women of India who engineer real social change.
Unfortunately, the other comparison is not a favorable one. To Kill A Tiger takes a very deliberate documentary approach to their subject matter and fills it with lots of talking heads. What makes the film so unusual and work so well is how intimate they managed to get with their two main subjects. This is a testament to the film crews dogged determination to follow the story wherever it might go.
In that exact manner it is very similar to Free Solo, the acclaimed movie that documented Alex Honnold’s free (i.e. no rope) climb up the sheer face of El Capitan in Yosemite. The filmmakers didn’t exercise any real creative judgments in either movie – they simply followed their subjects. The emotions derived from the movie are not the work of the filmmakers but come from the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of their subjects. In both cases, the films are riveting and produce strong, but very different, emotional responses. But do the filmmakers deserve the credit? In my review of Free Solo, I argued that while there was some mountain climbing skills involved in filming that movie, it was Alex Honnold who climbed it without ropes and took the risks. So, I took some exception that the film won Best Documentary when the major decision of the filmmakers was simply to turn the camera on. To me “Free Solo is a compelling movie that everyone should see. But it was too easy to make for the filmmakers to receive an Oscar.”
I have similar feelings about this one, although I concede that To Kill a Tiger involved more work. I’ve struggled for years to define what makes a good documentary and don’t seem to get any closer. This movie is a powerful film that anyone interested in the plight of women or social change should see. Is it a “good documentary”? I guess I’m still not sure. (4*)