It’s been a busy month for online releases at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) with films like Anything for Fame, Lay Down Your Heart, Koromoussa, and The Secret Order debuting for free streaming, but the NFB is saving the best for last with today’s online premiere of To Kill a Tiger. The feature doc from director Nisha Pahuja was POV’s pick for the best Canadian film of 2022 and both TIFF and the Canadian Academy agreed with To Kill a Tiger netting the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature at TIFF followed by the Best Documentary Feature prize at the Canadian Screen Awards. The film is a powerful observation of a family’s strength in the aftermath of a sexual assault.
To Kill a Tiger sees the drama largely through the eyes of Ranjit, a farmer in Jharkhand, India, who stands by his 13-year-old daughter when she summons the courage to hold her assailants accountable for their crimes. The neighbouring villagers tell Ranjit’s daughter to keep her head down and accept her fate, but the young woman and her family grasp that this story is tragically one among many. The family holds strong against the pressure to uphold the status quo and fights to break the cycle of gender-based violence in a country in which a rape is reported every 20 minutes. The family finds an ally in women’s rights activist Mahendra Kumra, and the film finds in one family’s fight a snapshot of a country anticipating a reckoning.
“The fascinating thing about India to me is that it has an incredibly progressive constitution,” Pahuja told POV in our Fall 2022 issue. “The dream that it was founded on—which is one of caste, gender, and religious equality—is what people like Mahendra-ji are constantly trying to achieve. Essentially, there’s a gap between what should be, and what is. But the fact that there is a ‘should be,’ is why I don’t despair in spite of statistics, in spite of headlines.”
Watch To Kill a Tiger below from the NFB.
It also screens at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema as part of the “Hottest Docs” series on Dec. 13 and 18.
To Kill a Tiger, Nisha Pahuja, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
