Waves of Reality

This Sundance Film Festival award winner sees a filmmaker following life-long fishermen friends at the crossroads of their lifestyle and professions against the backdrop of a world in crisis

- Joshua Muyiwa

A magical mix of serendipity, sweat and a staggering doggedness of six years are just some of the ingredients of Sarvnik Kaur's Against The Tide, a documentary on fishing and friendship that won this year's Special Jury Award for Vérité Filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival, making it the third year in a row, where an Indian documentary has won the category. Writing with Fire (2021) and All That Breathes (2022) were the previous winners.

Over six years, Kaur, a writer and filmmaker, worked with a Koli fisherwomen's collective in Mumbai while "they were trying to mount a resistance against the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) trying to put up a mall in their 175-year-old fish market". She was working alongside their protest, making short videos "to help them get public empathy, I suppose," she says. And through interactions with these Koli fisherwomen, Kaur began to feel, "it was so strange that the Koli communities are the natives of Mumbai and despite Bollywood being here, there wasn't any [significant] representation". At the same time, there were the initial talks of the Mumbai Coastal Road Project, and for Kaur, it felt like "the last stirrings of the Koli community". So, she started thinking "someone needs to document their existence".