Palok Singh

India is one of the most documented and simultaneously most underrepresented countries on earth. The sheer scale of what happens here daily, across geographies, languages, communities, and contradictions, exceeds the capacity of any single storytelling tradition to contain it. And yet, when you look at the landscape of documentary filmmaking in India, you find the same territories being mapped again and again, while vast stretches of lived experience remain almost entirely invisible on screen.

Some films do their job and disappear. They are watched at the event they were made for, appreciated in the room, and quietly forgotten by the following Monday. Others travel. They get forwarded. They surface again at a conference two years later. Someone mentions them in a meeting as the kind of film they want to make next.

Every production company says it now. Story-first. Storytelling at our core. We lead with story. The phrase has become so common in the film and video production industry in India that it has nearly lost its meaning entirely. It appears in agency decks, on studio websites, in pitch presentations, almost always without explanation.