Last year’s Academy Awards almost had an Assam connection.
Writing with Fire created history by becoming the first-ever documentary film from India to be nominated for the Oscars. It eventually lost the race to Summer of Souls at the 74th Academy Awards ceremony held in 2022. But more importantly, the directorial debut of Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh managed to break new ground as far as documentary filmmaking in India is concerned.
Encouragingly for India, two documentaries from India remain in contention for the Oscars. The Elephant Whisperers will be vying for the Best Documentary Short Film award, while All that Breathes is a contender for the Best Documentary film award. It augurs well for the documentary filmmaking scene in India and can inspire many more such projects that highlight rooted stories from the remotest corners of the country.
Had Writing with Fire made it to the Oscars, it would have been an amazing achievement for Assam, since Sushmit Bob Nath, the sound designer of Writing with Fire, was born in Silchar.
Nath has been a part of some critically-acclaimed works in this regard. Last year, this FTII graduate was nominated for the best sound designer award at the Finnish Academy Awards for Invisible Demons, a documentary on Delhi’s pollution. He’s also behind the sound design of the award-winning documentary film Machines.
In a telephonic conversation with EastMojo, Nath explained that when the documentary made it to the final list of nominees at the Academy Awards, he had no idea. “The thing is I have taken a break from social media these days. I did not know Writing with Fire was nominated for the Oscars till I started receiving congratulatory messages from friends and colleagues,” he said. Nath added that once the realisation dawned upon him, he was “overwhelmed with emotions.”
Talking about his profession, Nath says the best sound design is when the audience does not notice it. Sound, Nath says, is very personal.
“When one sees something, it is outward. Whereas when you hear something, the process is inward. It makes you feel,” he said. A scene’s dynamic changes if the sound is not right, he added.
Writing with Fire is about a newspaper run by Dalit women in a remote village. It was shot with a minimal crew. The directors adopted a guerilla style of shooting. It meant there were a lot of issues in terms of how the sound was recorded.
“We had to spend a lot of time sorting things out,” Nath said. Also, the documentary covered different districts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It included shots of election rallies during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
“We did not go to UP to record the sound. We searched a lot of libraries and asked some of my fellow sound designers in Mumbai if they had interesting sound recordings of UP in interesting situations. I had a few recordings of my own,” Nath added.
The most important quality for a sound designer to have is patience. “Sometimes to get a 4-minute-long scene in place, it may take days to get it right,” he added.
In his formative years, Nath was more interested in photography and music. He used to play the drums for a musical band during his college days.
“It so happened that I was intrigued by how our gigs sounded. We were playing the same thing more or less, but some gigs used to sound good while others didn’t,” he added.
Gradually, Nath started understanding the role of sound engineers and later came to know about the Film and Television Institute of India.
Nath says he learnt everything about filmmaking while studying sound design at FTII. Although Nath has worked on several highly-acclaimed feature films including Bhavesh Joshi, Bulbul Can Singh and Ghost Stories, he finds designing sound for documentary films more challenging.
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“In documentaries when you are showing real people in real places the laying in terms of sound has to be very precise. In fictional films, there is more creative liberty. Also in documentaries most of the time, the sound quality won’t be great. What you have to do is strike a balance,” Nath elaborated.
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