Reviews: To Kill a Tiger

Final Rating: 2/5

As part of the Academy of Death Racers film festival this year, I interviewed Austin Bunn, director of the short film Campfire, which blended elements of narrative and documentary. One of the questions I had was about how writing a narrative screenplay differs from “writing” a documentary; after all you can’t script real life or your subjects’ reactions to end up at a neat and tidy result you want. 

That said, I’ve found that many of the most effective documentaries are structured follow some sort of narrative – be it chronological such as 2019’s Apollo 11 or 2021’s Summer of Soul – or they are embedded with their subjects allowing us to follow them as we would a protagonist in a fictional work – think 2020’s A Thousand Cuts following Maria Ressa, 2022’s Navalny following the late Alexei Navalny, or even last year’s Beyond Utopia following a family of North Korean refugees. 

Nisha Pahuja’s Canadian documentary To Kill a Tiger chooses the latter, following the story of Indian farmer Ranjit as he takes on the Indian legal system to seek justice for his 13 year old daughter after she was gang raped. Outside of the rapists (whom we see as they are brought to court for their trial), the other antagonists we encounter are the traditionalists within their village. 

The family faces pressure from their neighbors in the village to settle this without the judicial system – to marry the daughter off to one of the rapists for the sake of communal harmony. From a Western and urban perspective where there is a clear demarcation between good and evil, such a compromise feels unconscionable. And yet we have it repeated at us time and again throughout the film, hinting at one of the root causes such systemic misogyny is present in the country.

This does bring up one of my critiques of the film – while the crusade of Ranjit and the social workers assisting him in his case is commendable and should be celebrated, as are the cultural shifts in India with the 2012 POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act, the film doesn’t really engage with the question of the systemic issues that lead to the horrifying statistic of a rape every 20 minutes. Or the communal coverup of such cases before they reach the legal system. At best we get the social workers coming to the village to try and talk sense into Ranjit’s neighbors, but to little effect. 

Even if the outcome of the case was a landmark 25 year sentence and as we learn rape convictions have jumped from 27% in 2018 to 39% in 2020, the documentary feels like it’s looking at symptom of the issue and not at the underlying root causes which is where I feel the more interesting questions lie. 

For example, I never quite shook the feeling that Ranjit had a more interesting story to him than we are shown. He was born and raised as a farmer and seemed to be a well integrated member of his community before the crime, so what led him to be the first of his kind (at least in the way the film portrays it) to defy his villages’ wishes? Is it simply because he is a loving father? If so, does that imply no one else in his village has been a loving father and/or what circumstances led him to be special? 

My other critique of the film concerns how about three fourths of the way through, the villagers become increasingly suspicious of the camera crew who has come to film the family for the documentary over weeks and months, to the point where they threaten the crew with violence. 

While ultimately as Heisenberg suggests, it is impossible to be in the act of observing something without influencing the outcome of what you observe, this does feel like a rather gratuitous example of that. 

Journalists and media generally strive to not be part of the story they’re covering; while they may be along for the ride they try not to intervene barring perhaps being the only one present who can help save a life or prevent injury. While perhaps not the end of the world when it came to this story in particular, I can’t deny it colored my view of the film overall.

To end on a positive note though, while this film certainly is not an easy watch, it does cover an important topic that impacts a huge part of the world and celebrates those who strive to make a difference in that regard. In particular, the epilogue detailing how the daughter, who goes by the pseudonym Kiran, has thrived since the events of the film and is now studying medicine gives hope at the resiliency of the human spirit, and serves as an inspiration for us all.