What the fuck is docufiction anyway?

The longest month is over, long live the longest month. Dear friend, how was your January?

This one sped by for me. I was in Dhaka for Chobi Mela (Asia's oldest international biennale of photography begun in 2000 by Shahidul Alam) for some of it, and preparing to leave before that. So it feels like going to the gym and going to Dhaka consumed my month. I'm back in Delhi now, just in time for India Art Fair; returning from Chobi Mela to this, to likely Kochi next month, is making me feel like that meme about unintentionally becoming important at my job. The job in question being art criticism feels like a joke. Not the idea of criticism, but the idea that being a critic could support a living in India.¹

Still it's fun to pretend and bid goodbye to the winter in this way. Tonight I'm going to two shows. The first is the opening of artist Alida Sun's solo 'RITES' at Method Delhi. I've been following her intriguing minimal techno blips, since they popped up on my Instagram feed. Coding and embroidery are an intriguing combination to me. More here.

Edit from next morning: It was an interesting show. Alida, the artist, gave a talk that caught my attention more than the artworks themselves. The show was made of pairings of digital art and embroidery. Each artwork typically had a tablet featuring Alida's pixellated Jenny Holzer style triusms, and beside it a medium-sized tapestry that the women of the SSMI collective had embroidered, based on the coded output. I liked the mirror-work, and this piece with the hearts was my favourite.

Alida said that in some of the designs the women had put their own spin on it, adding flowers to the embroidery where none existed. I like the idea of code from the digital world sprouting flowers when improvised on in the real world. She also talked about how deeply women are tied to the history and origin of coding, to the extent that women handwove the computer code that put humans on the moon in the 1960s. Wild to de-abstract the computer-work as a weaving of thread.

Something I like about going to art-shows and talks is that it forces me to get out of my sweatpants and put on my face. It's so easy to feel like a grub in winter, and it's nice to be reminded that I do love fashion, pulling together outfits and playing with colour. Yesterday I wore a grey raw silk Ikat saree that I'd picked up from Puri years ago on a work-trip. I paired it with this silk shirt from With N. They've hiked their prices now, but I'd still say it's a good investment piece.

This has really been a hero-piece for me, and fetched me so many compliments for its gorgeous deep green jewel tone. It feels soft and breathable on the skin, and like a lot of With N's pieces, the silhouette is oversized -- a style that I appreciate more in my thirties. I've worn it as a top, a sari-blouse, as an overshirt on different occasions.

Spending time with photos, film and documentary work in the last few years has me thinking a lot about the line between fiction and nonfiction. This is something that I thought of at Chobi Mela, looking at Alessandra Sanguinetti's multiyear documentation of two cousin sisters in rural Argentina. I wondered what was staged, and what was 'caught' in the moment, fortuitously.

You might remember that I promised a dispatch from my trip to the Dharamshala Interntational Film Festival (DIFF) in November. That forms the meat of this edition of The Fat Cat. Throughout the many documentaries I watched over four days in the hills, it became clear that the line between fiction and nonfiction is blurring, and what documentary means going forward is changing, has been changing for some time now.

NOTES FROM DIFF 2025

The feature documentaries at the 14th edition showcased singular personalities, concerns of migration, labour and disappearing tradition among environmental collapse and the steady march of global authoritarianism. Most interestingly, there was a marked tendency among directors to embrace a highly stylised narrative form, almost approaching the language of feature film. This blurring of the lines between documentary and narrative feature raises questions of what genre-distinctions might mean for the future of cinema. 

 By far, the standouts among feature documentaries were The Wolves Always Come at Night directed by Gabrielle Brady, and In Hell With Ivo directed by Kristina Nikolova. 

The Wolves Always Come at Night, categorised as a ‘docu-drama’, tells the story of herders in the Mongolian desert pushed into the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar after losing half their herd to a dust storm. Davaa and Zaya, the couple at the centre of the story, are also credited as writers for the documentary, alongside director Gabrielle Brady and Bigna Tomschin. 

Described as ‘filming in retrospect’, Davaa and Zaya returned to their homestead in the Gobi desert to recreate those scenes for film, after they had already moved to the ger -- the outskirts of the city, to find work. The film ends with two sequences.

The first is a surreal musical performance with a singer singing a ballad to lost horses and a lost way of life, in a karaoke style bar. It conjures the operatic mood of Aki Kaurismaki’s ‘Fallen Leaves’ where we watch grand ballads play out in dingy bars where alcoholics and workmen gather. This dreamlike segment in ‘Wolves’ follows Davaa telling his wife on the phone that he won’t be returning home that night, since he needs to be at work early. We are in a moment of complete estrangement -- from his herd and preferred profession in nature, to pulling down pristine land bit by bit for his construction company, from his family and the rhythms of home.

Want to read more?

Subscribe to riddhidastidar.com to keep reading this exclusive post.

Subscribe Now