It is getting increasingly hard to pick up a catalogue for a documentary programme or festival and not find the words Public Service Broadcasting Trust.

The films produced by the Union government-supported trust are everywhere: on Doordarshan, at screenings by cultural and political organisations, at film festivals and on DVD. Of the 15 documentaries being shown at the International Film Festival of India that is being held in Goa between November 20 and 30 , three are PSBT productions. The diverse themes reflect the range of subjects tackled through the years by filmmakers commissioned by the trust. Pratik Biswas’s On and Off the Records is an engrossing account of the impact of the recording industry on Hindustani classical music. In Candles in the Wind, Kavita Bahl and Nandan Saxena explore the ill-effects of the Green Revolution in Punjab through the eyes and voices of women. Qissa-E-Parsi, by Divya Cowasji and Shilpi Gulati, pays tribute to Mumbai’s fast-shrinking Zoroastrian community.

Varied explorations

PSBT is one of the leading documentary producers in a country that lacks them. Documentary filmmakers usually fund their films through multiple sources, including funds specially created to support a film in various stages of its production, non-profit groups, cultural organisations and the odd munificent private producer. A bit like the Films Division, which is run and controlled by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, PSBT invites filmmakers to make films that will fill 52 weeks of programming a year. The completed projects are screened every week on the state-run Doordarshan and Lok Sabha TV, occasionally on DD News and on spec on the private broadcaster NDTV 24x7.

“We get 100% funding from Prasar Bharati and the Ministry of External Affairs,” said Rajiv Mehrotra, Managing Trustee and Commissioning Editor of PSBT and a founder member of the organisation along with directors Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Mrinal Sen in 2000. (The MEA’s contribution ensures that PSBT produces a handful of films every year about various government projects and achievements). Prasar Bharati keeps telecast rights for five years.

PSBT’s outlay ranges between Rs 2 crore and Rs 2.5 crore, which means that each commissioned film must be made on a few lakhs depending on its length. PSBT productions might not be as slick, rich or experimental as other independent documentaries can get, but they do cover a wide field. There are documentaries about cinema, such as Prabhat Pheri, about the legendary Prabhat Film Company studio, and Bhaijaan, a deconstruction of Salman Khan fandom. There are films about urban realities, such as Vertical City, about a housing project for slum dwellers in Mumbai, and My Rio, My Tokio, a love poem to Kolkata. There are explorations of gender issues, including Mera Apna Sheher, about women and public space in Delhi, and Nirnay, an appraisal of the choices faced by young working-class women. The titles on sexuality include And You Thought You Knew Me, containing encounters with five transgendered characters, and My Sacred Glass Bowl, about attitudes towards virginity.

Issue or form

The recent crop has not been as good as previous years. This year’s edition of the trust’s annual Open Frame festival, held in Delhi in end August and early September, produced slim pickings despite a variety of themes and narrative styles. The balance between producing a film that is socially relevant as well as aesthetically important is a delicate one, said Mehrotra. Part of the problem is the popular understanding of the documentary as a means of investigating social issues rather than as a cinematic form of expression in itself.

“Ninety out of 100 proposals are about social issues and this is what we struggle with,” Mehrotra said. “Of course, it’s not the idea per se that makes the film great, it depends on how we deal with it. You cannot produce excellence if there isn’t an element of play. There are zillion narrative approaches to documentary. We have also felt that filmmakers were not pushing the boundaries of the genre and were not experimenting.”

Proposals are scrutinised by a committee, which includes film historian and archivist Suresh Chabria and casting director and festival programmer Uma Da Cunha. “During the production process, during scripting and research, we try and engage with the filmmakers, but it is ultimately their call,” Mehrotra said. “We get at least three people to comment on a film, and we give all the opinions to the filmmakers. They can choose to assimilate the opinions but also ignore them.”

Indian documentary filmmakers are increasingly taking personalised and poetic-philosophical approaches, and there is enough of an experimental spirit within the scene for directors to get around the constraints posed by restrictive funding and the absence of a discernible viewership. The fact that PSBT films travel everywhere – television, NGO-supported screenings, on the DVD circuit – means they must appeal to as broad a spectrum as possible.

“We remain a work in progress,” Mehrotra said. “It is the temptation of commissioning editors to intervene, but the independent scene is small and sacred, so we feel that we should not compromise on that. The independent documentary is defined as a film that the filmmaker wants to make.”

Funds crunch

The PSBT model might ensure that several filmmakers, especially first-timers, get a shot at chasing their ideas, but it does not work for many others. Since PSBT wholly produces its titles and does not encourage partnerships with outside funders who might improve the budgets, filmmakers are stuck with “kirana-shop rates and poor production values,” complained a veteran director on the condition of anonymity. The PSBT’s insistence on volume to fill television slots means that already meagre funds are spread over too many productions, the filmmaker added.

The trust’s original ambition was to be an “embryonic institution in public service broadcasting” and to perhaps “grow into a small channel”, Mehrotra said. The organisation was initially set up as a result of a tripartite agreement between the trust, the government and Ford Foundation. The government stepped in as full-time funders after Ford Foundation’s media programme ended around 2005. The founders modelled the organisation on the Public Broadcasting Service channel in the United States of America, “The American model is simple – they get some money from the government and corporate funding, which has huge tax incentives,” Mehrotra said.

The PSBT’s sanctioned budget hasn’t kept step with increasing production costs. A fund crunch meant that the Open Frame festival could not invite outside productions and was restricted to its own titles. Yet, PSBT’s library, comprising a little over 600 films, can keep it going for several months. Selectors and programmers who might not jump at the new lot have several back catalogues to plunder. The fact that the films can be watched on or bought off the internet means that at any given point, a PSBT title is never too far away.