A scene from Bedabrata Pain’s Deja Vu
The historic protest of Indian farmers in 2020-21 against the three farm laws enacted by the Union government had inspired some remarkable documentaries, which have been showcased in the past editions of the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK). This year’s edition features a documentary that looks at the whole issue from a different angle, through the lens of history, not learning which we are doomed to repeat.
Scientist-turned-filmmaker Bedabrata Pain’s Deja Vu, being screened in the Long Documentary Competition category, takes us on a 10,000 km road trip through the heart of America to find out who benefited and who lost out following similar market reforms enacted in the agricultural sector in the U.S. in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. What emerges from the travels are farming families which have fallen into ruins, abandoned villages and massive tracts of lands that belonged to countless farmers now in the possession of a handful of corporations.
Farmer suicides in the U.S.
In a desolate village in Wisconsin, the team meets a dairy farmer who was forced to sell a farm which his family has been farming for 150 years. One of the most shocking facts revealed in the documentary is the number of farmer suicides in the U.S., of which not much is often heard of. In fact, it is this aspect which struck the filmmaker when he began researching for the film in 2021.
“Because I live in the U.S. half of the time, there was much confusion when the farm protests began in India. I started reading up to find out whether there is any truth to what the economists are claiming about farm sector prosperity through these reforms. The first thing I came across was the large number of farm suicides in the U.S. When we started travelling for the documentary, the devastation that we witnessed was not just economic, but of entire lifestyles that disappeared. This change we tried to capture started happening during Reagan’s time, after the reforms. By the end of the journey, it became very clear that what India is trying to do has happened in America, destroying the entire sector,” says Mr. Pain in an interview to The Hindu.
The story is the same in the grain, dairy and the livestock sectors that the documentary covers, with big corporations coming in and pushing everyone else out. He says almost every farmer they met had someone in the family who committed suicide. The documentary manages a delicate balance between stories that moves us and data that shocks us.
“Even though the reforms come under the rubric of the free market, it is actually a corporate market. We wanted to make a movie that would make people think as to why this process is happening. Getting the balance right between thinking and feeling took me a lot of time,” he says.
Mr. Pain, who was part of the NASA team that invented the CMOS digital image sensor technology used in digital cameras and mobile phones, holds over 90 patents. In 2012, he made his feature film debut with acclaimed work Chittagong.
“My interest is in a large number of things. I think in today’s world you are boxed into specific areas and are asked to go deeper into it. I consciously made the decision that I will not be doing the same thing all my life,” he says.
Published – August 22, 2025 06:13 pm IST
