Yousuf Saeed is an independent filmmaker, archivist and writer based in India. He was an international visiting scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center in October 2024. In a conversation with Digital Public Fellow Utsavi Singh, Saeed reflects on the evolving landscape of documentary filmmaking in South Asia. He discusses the challenges of making and screening documentaries in an era of declining public interest, the rise of short-form content, and the complexities of intellectual property in the age of AI.

Utsavi Singh: How do you see documentaries and other forms of filmmaking contributing uniquely to humanities research in South Asia? How do you encourage students to engage more closely with documentaries and filmmaking as a form of knowledge and research?

Yousuf Saeed: So the documentary form in India emerged before India had even achieved independence. The Films Division of India was started around 1948, and it did a lot of early film documentation. A lot of newsreels were prepared at the time, and many independent filmmakers were also making documentaries—what were called “factuals” at the time. So, much of 20^th-century-history was recorded on film at the time, and it continued even after India achieved independence. At that moment, when a new nation was awakening, many filmmakers were showing how India is and how it should be. Filmmakers like Sukhdev made some very interesting kinds of films about what an emergent India was like, and so on.

Then, slowly, as television became more popular, more documentaries were made, and in the last few decades, we have seen that the documentary also has become a voice for social and political activism. In India, as you know, there's a lot of social injustice, and many things still need to be worked out. We need to bring out those stories through documentaries, and a lot of filmmakers have done that—they have made these so-called “activist films.” And all of that is historical material, as it has documented an emergent India. So I think the documentaries are very important for today's scholars, whether they are from social sciences or humanities, or even the sciences. A documentary is like an editorial or a column in a newspaper, which adds a deeper layer to the current news or the coverage of events. So, it's a very important medium of information. Unlike news anchoring or news-gathering, the documentary form also has an aesthetic side to it—I think a documentary can be a piece of art. So, a documentary filmmaker is also an artist, not just someone who gathers the news.

Unfortunately though, we have not promoted the documentary film as a form which can be shown widely. The production of documentary films has been promoted, and people have been making films for many decades—but how do you show them to the public? How can people watch documentaries? That is an area which has been very weak so far. We did not develop any kind of system, any kind of channel, any way to promote, and to show documentary films. I mean, even today, in the 21st century, if I make an independent documentary film, I have no idea what to do with it. I don't know how to take it to the public. Of course, there is the internet and social media. But as a filmmaker, I cannot keep making films for free and show them for free. I also need to earn my bread and butter. So how do I do that?

Utsavi: Yes, that is a difficult question to answer. Further, if filmmaking as a form of knowledge hasn't been promoted to the public, that also means that so much archival material of this kind has also not been preserved properly, or at least that there is no central place where students can access documentary films. I also wonder how this industry can be compared to the news industry or newspaper industry in India, which has such wide reach, in so many languages. On the other hand, it is rare to find documentaries about India in any languages besides English and Hindi.

Yousuf: Well, one of the reasons for not having so many documentaries or so many films as compared to newspapers is the expensive mode of filmmaking. I mean, today, of course, everybody and anybody who has a mobile phone can shoot anything. But in the past, say 20 or 30 years ago, filmmaking and aquiring basic equipment—a film camera or TV camera—was a very expensive affair. A single person individually could not afford to go out and record anything. When I started my career, a video camera would cost anything from 40 to 50 lakh rupees. Then editing machines would cost even more than that. So no individual could afford that. Only a state-owned television channel could really do that. And before the 1990s, there were no private channels in India as well. So how do you make a film? The Films Division and other film institutions tried to do some documentation. It’s only when the video camera became popular and inexpensive that people were able to buy VCRs. Before that, there were some cheaper forms of film, like the 8mm or 16mm. People could buy smaller cameras, but they were accustomed to making home videos—so filmmaking was very limited. When I started my career as a filmmaker or a television professional, I used to dream that instead of taking a crew of 5 or 6 people on a shoot, I would be able to shoot just on my own. This has become possible now, and in my own lifetime. I can even carry two cameras, set them up myself and do an interview recording all by myself.

So things have changed and have become more affordable. People are starting their own channels on YouTube, and so on. Many more people can make films, and also, now they don’t have to be under the control of a state-owned TV channel. You can start your own channel. Earlier, you had to approach a TV channel like Doordarshan. It's become much easier now, and much more affordable for anybody to make a documentary. And that way I think more history is being documented. But, more access also creates some problems too.

Utsavi: I would love to hear more about that.

Yousuf: Well, firstly, if you want to become a journalist or a TV professional, you go through training in which you are taught not only about the technology, but also the ethics of journalism. Things like “How do you tell a story? How do you do journalism, how do you write, how do you investigate a story, and how do you make sure that it is authentic?” But today, everybody has a mobile phone and they can document whatever they want, whether they have received training or not. They are able to document anything and pass it off as content, you know. So we’re going to face many problems as the technology comes into the hands of many more people. And then there is AI. Many companies are tasking AI bots with creating content. That's another big problem that we are going to face.

Utsavi: So given these increasing challenges, have you had any conversations with fellow filmmakers about any ideas for overcoming them?

Yousuf: Yes. I will go back to the idea of promotion, or reaching the public. That is a challenge documentary filmmakers still face, even though we've got access to technology and mobile phones and social media. So, why has the documentary not been promoted through our usual networks? Let me take you back a few decades when people didn’t usually have a TV in their homes, and they used to watch films only in cinema halls. So the Indian government started this idea—because the Films Division and other institutions were making documentaries—they made a rule that before every feature film, you will have to watch a small documentary. So if it was a three-hour or a two-and-a-half-hour feature film, you must watch a 20-minute or a 30-minute documentary. So that way, everybody was able to watch at least some documentaries. At least, the masses got a sense of what a documentary is, and how it compares to a feature film. They could see which of those was a factual and realistic film, and which was a fictional film. That rule was in place for some time, but when multiplex cinema halls became popular, everything changed. Now, time is very important for every cinema hall, or how many shows they can do in every slot or theater. Also, they used to have a three-hour slot for each theater, but now things have become more flexible. As a result, the documentary has been ignored. Similarly, for the television channels, the air time is very important. Every second is important, because they could sell that time to advertisers. Why would they show a documentary film which is 30 minutes long? That is why hardly any TV channels show any documentaries. So, documentary filmmakers are in a really difficult place. They don't know where to show their films.

Film festivals are one way of showing their films but they only take place in big cities, and only a limited number of people will come to watch them. There are international film festivals, where some people outside India would be able to watch these films. But again, you are still not reaching the public. Today, of course, with the opening up of social media and especially the OTT platforms, all these platforms where you can watch movies like Netflix or Prime Video, even those are commercial platforms. They would only show things which will bring them money. And they are also very hard to access for an ordinary filmmaker. Its not easy to reach out to Netflix as a content creator. You have to go through agents and a whole bureaucracy. So again, it's very difficult.

But here I would like to pinpoint a very fundamental problem. As you create more documentaries, what do you do with them? There is no system, there is no central archive or a database of documentaries where every film is given a certain code number, or something like that. Here I am comparing documentaries with two other media. One is book publishing. If you publish a book, you get an ISBN number, and the publisher takes care of everything for you. And the other is feature films. If you make a feature film, there is usually a big production company behind you. They take care of everything. The International Movie Database gives you a number. So these two media, book publishing and feature films are very well established. If you make a film, or if you write a book, it will immediately be recognized the world over. And anybody can access your feature film or your book anywhere. But if you make a documentary film, especially an independent documentary film, what do you do with it? There is no ISBN number, there is no IMDb number or anything similar. So, when I make a film, I have to continuously struggle to get recognition first. I have to go around and tell people “Here is my film, I have made this film, please watch it.” I will give it to film festivals, or maybe, I'll go to some independent screening spaces in big cities. I will have to make a request, “Please show my film.” So all that, one has to do individually, there is no system which will take care of things. Of course, there are lots of smaller, independent websites which are coming up. There are some OTT platforms like Mubi. But because the number of films is so big, they cannot deal with them all. They cannot show everything. So you have to really struggle.

Utsavi: In academia, we are able to publish articles that are stored and held by journals, etc. So then how do we find a solution to this?

Yousuf: Well, one of the practical things that we do in India—on our own, again—is to go out to schools and colleges and whoever we know, and we ask them to show these films. We do it to teach students and make them aware of this medium which is different from the usual reels on their phones.

But one other thing which I am exploring right now are the universities in North America and Europe. Every university there has a digital library. They have music, footage, e-books, and all kinds of digital content. But they still need to acquire many more documentaries and put them in their catalog. So, at least their own registered users would be able to watch those documentaries.

There are many filmmakers, including me, who don't want to put their content on free platforms like YouTube, because there are issues with that. First of all, YouTube will put advertisements on our content and make money through that. They don't even share enough ad revenue with the content creator. In fact, they keep changing their rules of what they call “monetization.” So if I put a film up on YouTube, they expect me to have a huge number of subscribers and thousands of minutes of viewing before putting ads on it. But more than that, I don't want people to just watch everything for free. Because when you are constantly watching something for free, you don't value it as much as you value something you paid for.

So we are looking forward to some platforms where documentaries could be hosted and people could watch them by paying a small amount that will help us make more films. And institutions like university libraries can do something of that sort—pay us a small amount and put our film up on the library website, so that more people can watch it. So that is something that is definitely needed. That will also, in a way, bridge the gap between academia and filmmakers. In addition, when we make a documentary film, we record a lot of footage. We have a lot of unused footage, which is also very useful for a scholar. So I'm even open to making all that unedited footage available on some archives where a scholar, or a university student can watch it, and find some research material through that.

Utsavi: That is such a good idea! And a very useful one where so much material can be made part of an archive.

Yousuf: Digital archiving is a big deal for education today. So many museums and libraries have opened up their collections, they're digitizing them and making them available, and that is so useful, so valuable for a student. In fact, when I visited Stanford University as an international scholar, I visited the Green Library and looked up their digital repository. I found a lot of useful material. Initially, I thought, “I have come to California from India, what will I find here about Indian cinema?” But actually, I found some material which was very useful and very unique, which is housed only at the Stanford University library. And I'm sure that this is the case with many other universities in the US and in Europe. Their archival system is so good and they value historical material so much, and they keep it very nicely. So I really found that very useful. In India or other developing nations, we are still struggling to create such kinds of archives where material could be preserved and made available to more people.

There is something very interesting I found at the Green library. On their website, there is a digital resource called Hindi cinema: histories of film-making. I had no idea that something like that exists. A scholar from London named Nasreen Munni Kabir had gone to Mumbai with a film crew, and recorded a whole lot of interviews with people in the Indian film industey—Javed Akhtar, A.R. Rahman, Shah Rukh Khan. This entire collection of interview footage was donated to the Stanford University library. And it has been put up with all the transcriptions as well. There's also an interview of Nasreen Munni Kabir herself where she explains why she did this. I found that very useful, and it's not available anywhere else. In fact, I'm writing a book on cinema qawwali, and I thought I would never find anything on cinema qawwali in California, but I was surprised that in that archive I found an interview of this music director, Naushad, where he's talking about one very specific incident, which is very useful for me, and I'm going to quote it in my book.

Besides this, in the Green Library, I found another very good archive. I was told that there are a lot of boxes containing many types of archives in the Special Collections of the library. And from among them, I was able to find a fantastic collection of booklets containing song lyrics from Bengali language films as well as many Bollywood movies. It seems that someone, probably from Kolkata, donated their entire collection to Stanford University. I was only able to access five boxes, but there are so many more. There is a huge amount of material lying around in Stanford University, and this, I saw in only one day of my visit. If I had more time, I could have explored more things, probably.

A selection of documentaries made by Yousuf Saeed were acquired by Stanford Libraries a few weeks after this interview was conducted. They are available in digital and DVD versions here.