‘To Kill A Tiger’ Director Nisha Pahuja On Kiran’s Decision to Show Her Face in the Oscar-Nominated Doc

Awards Daily talks to director Nisha Pahuja about her Academy Award-nominated documentary To Kill a Tiger, which follows one family’s fight to support their daughter who was a victim of sexual assault.

Fate led director Nisha Pahuja to tell the harrowing story of To Kill a Tiger. While in the field filming hundreds of hours of material on the Srijan Foundation, an NGO (non-governmental organization) that works with men and boys in gender sensitivity training across 30 villages in the Indian state of Jharkhand, she came across Ranjit, whose daughter was gang-raped after a family wedding.

“Ranjit was enrolled in one of these gender sensitization programs,” said Pahuja. “When this happened to his daughter, the NGO obviously stepped up to the plate and tried to support him, and I was just filming the NGO and came across the story. Initially, there was no sense of how things were going to go or how far they’d be able to take this. It was one foot in front of the other, filming and seeing what was going to happen.”

In the beginning of the film, Pahuja offers a disclaimer, asking people not to share identifying images of its 13-year-old survivor, whose name has been changed to protect her.

“With ‘Kiran,’ since I didn’t know how much Ranjit’s story was going to be a part of the whole film, I didn’t know how much she’d be a part of it either. I just filmed what was critical with her because I also didn’t want to traumatize her further. I filmed her sparingly.”

The master interview with Kiran and the scene of her braiding her hair at the beginning of the film were shot after the trial.

“We were going to mask her identity and hide her. We tried a lot of different techniques, including one they used in Welcome to Chechnya. They gave these young Chechnyans who belonged to the LGBT community deep fake faces. We’d contacted the same team and were going to do the same thing for her. We found an actor to play Kiran, and it was really striking, but it felt strange. It was a little bizarre. We tried a number of different things partly because the film was taking so long. Luckily, she turned 18 by the time we were finished, and she was in a position to make a decision. Her parents were so proud of her and wanted her to come forward, but everyone knew it had to be her decision. She watched the film and decided she wanted to be seen.”

Ultimately, Pahuja would have supported Kiran’s decision either way, but she does feel revealing her face adds to the air of defiance in the film, especially in the way Kiran walks poised to present testimony at trial.

“Hiding her face was a strange thing. Not that it undermined the film, but that it undermined her. I felt that it reinforced this idea of shame and that survivors are the ones who should be stigmatized and that they’ve done something wrong and should be hidden. There’s something unethical about hiding her because it was rooted not in her choice but in something that had been imposed upon her from society.”

Shame is an underlying theme in this doc, not just with Kiran taking back her own, but with Ranjit grappling with his. The only reason he left his daughter at the wedding was because she was with family, and little did he know one of those family members would go on to harm his child. There’s also a deep shame within the community. They know what the boys did was wrong (the “boys” being aged 18, 24, and older), but they want this stain to go away.

“They didn’t side with the boys; they didn’t condone their actions. They just didn’t want them to be punished in a legal way. They wanted Kiran to marry one of the rapists and for the thing to go away because it was a shame to the entire community.”

Pahuja even becomes embroiled in the village dynamics when the filmmaking comes into question.

“When we first started filming, everyone was struck and dumbfounded and vulnerable. They didn’t quite know how to respond to us. There were moments when they were receptive and open to speaking with us. As time went on and pressure mounted, that’s when things started to get tense. I was always checking in with the family, ‘Should I be doing this?’ They kept wanting us to keep filming. They said we gave them protection and also they were taken seriously at court as a result of us documenting the story.”

The tensions culminate in a scene where the community threatens the film crew, which Pahuja said is when she recognized how complicated the process had become.

“You go into these situations and you’re doing the right thing and motivated by the right thing as a crew. It’s important to do this because this is how you make change and it’s necessary to do that, but I felt a tremendous responsibility in the fraying of a community and those bonds. I had tremendous guilt around that. Since then, things have healed, and part of our work now is with that community, to actually see how we can support them.”

To Kill a Tiger is playing in select theaters.