By Maya Palit

Last week, the 27-year-old filmmaker Kathu Lukose was contemplating going to court.

The former JNU student’s documentary March March March was lined up for screening at the Kerala international short film festival (IDSFFK). That is, until the Information and Broadcasting Ministry refused to grant it exemption from a censor certificate.

Lukose’s 18-minute documentary explores the JNU protests of 2016, when ‘anti-national’ resurfaced as a favourite buzzword. It contains interviews and footage of public meetings, human chains, and campus-organised protests, and looks closely at clashes between student groups.

Of the nearly 170 documentaries at the festival, the only other films to be denied permission were about Rohith Vemula (The Unbearable Being of Lightness) and Kashmiri artists (In the Shade of Fallen Chinar) and it doesn’t take much extrapolation to understand that this is a clampdown not only on artistic freedom of expression, but on the issues these films explore and stand for. As this article argues, though, in some instances censorship like this only means more circulation for the films, and all three documentaries are now up on the Internet, and were also screened across Kerala.

While documentary filmmakers around the country have been protesting the clampdown on these three films, and those present at the Thiruvananthapuram festival protested on stage during the closing ceremony, there has been a new development in court. According to reports, on Tuesday, the Kerala High Court responded orally to the writ petition about the censorship, and said it was uncalled for. The Centre has been asked to file a counter-affidavit in the next two weeks, after which the court will pass a judgement.

But according to a Facebook post by Lukose, the appeal made by the Chalachitra Academy to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting was rejected. And on June 18th, a written statement detailing why the documentaries were denied exemptions was provided. It claimed that films on issues about Kashmir might be ‘exploited by antinational elements’, while the other two, including Lukose’s film, ‘relate to students’ agitations in recent past which already had adversely affected the law and order situation in some parts of country including university campuses’.