Indian filmmaker trains lens on Covid hardships in ‘brutal’ documentary about domestic migrant crisis

‘Lords of Lockdown’ filmmaker Mihir Fadnavis talks to Maanya Sachdeva about the experience of shooting a ‘time capsule’ documentary

A still from Mihir Fadnavis’s debut documentary film ‘Lords of Lockdown’ (Antifa Films)

Time has turned debut filmmaker Mihir Fadnavis’s unflinching feature-length documentary into something far more profound than he’d originally intended.

“A time capsule,” the former journalist says about his film documenting India’s horrifying crisis, when millions of daily wage labourers left the big cities to return to their villages on foot after the nationwide lockdown in March 2020 rendered them unemployed and deathly hungry.

Initially, his plan was to tail doctors and paramedics in Mumbai – where Fadnavis is based – and document the onset of the pandemic. With celebrated Indian filmmaker and producer Anurag Kashyap backing the project, Fadnavis began prepping for Lords of Lockdown a week before prime minister Narendra Modi ordered a “full ban” on people stepping out of their homes in view of the escalating global health crisis.