The Indian farmers’ protest on Delhi’s borders in late 2020, was arguably the longest citizen-led protest in post-Independence India. Lasting a little over a year, weathering a bone-chilling winter and an equally oppressive summer, the farmers were labelled many things by the TV media: folks misunderstanding the government’s intentions to empower them, anti-social elements, even Khalistani terrorists. The protest sites invited the curiosity of documentarians: Nishtha Jain’s Farming The Revolution, Gurvinder Singh’s Trolley Times and Varrun Sukhraj’s Too Much Democracy were some of the films that chronicling the 13-month farmers’ agitation, interviewing them, getting experts to weigh in on initialisms (like MSP), and trying to understand the points of disagreement around the farm laws, which were hastily passed in the Parliament. Bedabrata Pain’s Deja Vu is another documentary that seeks to investigate the farm laws, which were then repealed. However, it takes a fresh approach on the matter – by looking at American farmers, who went through similar ‘industrialisation’ and ‘privatisation’ in the late 1980s. In Pain’s film, the crew claims to have driven tens of thousands of kms through the agrarian towns of America, interviewing dozens of farmers, trying to understand how their life changed after the government withdrew and private corporations entered. Voiced by actor Ali Fazal, Pain’s film is an urgent and sobering warning on the privatisation of the agricultural sector, something the three farm laws sought to do by removing the government from the picture, and letting billion-dollar corporations negotiate the price with farmers, under the guise of a ‘free-market’ economy. The Modi government too harped on the ‘freedom’ the farm laws would offer to small farmers from North India to sell their produce in Southern India. However, as Pain’s film illustrates through dozens of examples: deregulation has fatal implications for the small farmers. Pain’s film isn’t visually striking like, say, Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2009), which also spoke about the ills of unchecked capitalism. Operating on what appears to be a fraction of a budget of Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary, Pain’s film interviews its subjects in freezing barns, mournful-looking dining rooms, greyish studies containing piles of books, papers. Driving through desolate towns in states like Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin, the crew does a fine job of capturing the rural-to-urban migration through abandoned estates, rusting agricultural equipment and a handful of people persevering through the humiliation of what it’s like to be a small farmer in America in the 2020s. Over its runtime of 62 mins, Pain tries to overcome the tedium of the ‘talking-head’ approach (where a film switches between people talking to a camera), by showing graphs, charts and data to support the theories being thrown out by the farmers on camera. The revelations aren’t particularly earth-shattering for anyone familiar with Capitalism 101. However, it’s still damning to see how corporations drove people by the hundreds to kill themselves. The promise of agriculture industrialisation was that if farmers took on debt and increased production, the prices of the produce would go up. And since the middle-men were eliminated, the share of the farmer’s profit would automatically increase. However, in the 1990s as 3-4 big corporations started controlling the market, the prices for the produce went down. And because of constant consolidation, where big companies would buy out their smaller competitors, there came a point where farmers were either forced to sell at the corporation’s demanded price, or they would risk being boycotted in the market. It reached a place where the farmers couldn’t even recoup the cost of farming, causing the bank to sell their land (some of which they inherited through 4-5 generations), or kill themselves.An infographic in Pain’s film that truly startled me was a burger being sold in the market for USD 19. The average cost of the ingredients amount to less than $2, but a farmer makes only 27 cents off of it. It sounds familiar for the Indian contemporaries, who are obviously significantly higher in number, and arguably find themselves in even more desperate circumstances. When agriculture becomes a free-market undertaking, like in the rest of the economy, the one with the most amount of money is able to fleece the smaller players. There are only two choices – one, either get absorbed by a big player or two, get gutted. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, resulting in the wiping out of the small players. Another startling statement in Pain’s film is how Bill Gates is the owner of the most free-hold land in America. Employing almost half of India’s workforce, where a majority of farmers are small landholders, the deregulation of the Indian agricultural sector might prove to be a death sentence for many of them. A character in Pain’s film says it wonderfully: globalise the struggle, localise the hope.Deja Vu, thus, becomes an apt title for a film showing regimes are repeatedly prone to reckless decision-making, bowing in front of duopolies. Veteran journalist P. Sainath recently said during a keynote address that the repealed farm laws were trying to be tabled using a “backdoor”. It’s why Pain’s film only becomes that much more important – telling its audience about the fate that awaits Indian farmers, by looking at the past of American farmers. It would be tragic to not pay heed to this scientific, data-driven crystal ball.*Deja Vu is premiering at the International Documentary & Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) 2025, starting Aug 20.