Over the last five years, public discontent has been growing over the Indian government’s failure to implement many of its 2014 election promises, the large-scale sale of public companies and assets to private corporations, rising religious intolerance, and the takeover of institutions meant to protect democracy. There has been an increasing crackdown on human rights, with brave voices of dissent threatened with detention. In 2020, Indian farmers faced a similar fate when they began their agitation against newly enacted farm laws. But the unthinkable happened: over the course of a year, through radically peaceful means, the protesters reinvented the very meaning of power.
Over thirteen months, my team and I witnessed the exceptional bravery of the protesting farmers—their willingness to speak truth to power and their remarkable resourcefulness. Their determination, perseverance, discipline, and patience were deeply inspiring. Led by extraordinary leaders, the protagonists of the movement didn’t just hope or pray for success, nor did they calculate their chances before taking action. Instead, they embraced an entirely different language. They came to win—and they did. The scale and duration of the protest were awe-inspiring, but also posed significant challenges. It was the year of the COVID lockdown. I was fortunate to assemble a young and dedicated team that stayed through to the end, capturing not only the collective energy of the protest but also the individual transformations of its protagonists.
The film offers viewers an almost day-to-day experience of the protests as the seasons change, challenging the common misconception of farmers as uneducated, backward, or conservative. We meet evolved, wise, educated, and informed individuals—many of them respected leaders, writers, poets, and singers. Surrounded by police barricades, the farmers created a zone—a zone of possibilities, a zone of freedom in which the normal laws of the police state no longer applied. It became a space of optimism, hope, and action—a zone of camaraderie within an authoritarian state. The farmers tended to the sick, fed one another, and continuously improved their shelters to adapt to changing conditions. They transformed farm implements into sleeping platforms, libraries, schools, and protest stages. A culture of sharing, community, and jugaad (indigenous, ad hoc problem-solving) was fully on display. There were mini-universities and communes with libraries, community kitchens, and film screening spaces. In this unprecedented gathering of people from all castes and classes, urban and rural backgrounds, and across generations—with strong participation from women—we witnessed how faith and revolutionary thinking could coexist.