There are two days left in the International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kerala – the IDSFFK – and things are in flux.As has been widely reported, just over a week ago, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting withheld permission to 31 films from being screened at the festival. Various ministries – from External Affairs to Defence, to Home – were allocated different titles to review. Clearly various anxieties need to be assuaged. 24 of the films have since been cleared (some say 23), which means that either seven or eight are now in limbo. The Kerala State Chalachitra Academy moved the high court demanding immediate clearance, but the court has denied the permission to screen. The feeling right now at the festival is one of pessimism. Meanwhile, the filmmakers are asking that, whatever happens, at least the jury be allowed to see their films: they have, after all, been officially selected. A pamphlet put out yesterday lists five of them – Spandan Bannerjee’s Parliament Street, Bipuljit Basu’s Redlight to Limelight, Afiya Khalid and Rizwan Rahman’s Sanitized Republic: Cast(e) and Contracts, Sankaraa’s The Mali and the Parasite, and Sharanyaa Dey’s In Search of Buddha. It isn’t entirely clear right now which the other two are: one could be Shimmering Odyssey by Prasun Goswami and Raunak Shivhare (available for viewing on The Wire’s YouTube site).I write this as a film historian. I look at the films listed above, to ask the question – how does it come to this? What is it about these films that qualifies them for a Ministry-level ban? What does the Union government see in them that gets them this anxious about their public screening? And what procedure is this anyway, of governmental prior permission, that seems completely outside of the systems defined by the Indian Cinematograph Act?By the time this short essay is published, we should have some answers. We may know if the films have been allowed to compete or, if not, whether all filmmakers can stand united and refuse to accept awards. Whatever happens, the questions shall remain: why were these films targeted?, and by what procedure? Meanwhile, I write a personal response to four of the five films mentioned, which I was able to see courtesy of the filmmakers present here.The poster of In Search of Buddha.Both Dey’s In Search of Buddha and Bannerjee’s Parliament Street are especially quixotic targets for a ban. In Search of Buddha handles the difficult genre of short fiction with aplomb, as it tells of two filmmakers trying to make a film on the mythical figure of Buddha – the original icon but also a former Naxalite leader of the same name who appeared to have vanished from history. They struggle with several of the standard tropes of the genre of the Naxalite film – the narrow alleys, the abandoned Maidan at night – and with standard characters, former radicals who keep hinting that there is more to the story than meets the eye. They then meet Buddha himself, and learn of a reality that was rather less than heroic. They make their film, receive their accolades, but conclude, rather ruefully, that it didn’t work. Perhaps the truth was rather less useful to the story they wanted to tell than the myth might have been.The short fiction film, unlike perhaps the short story, is an awkward genre – and its awkwardness has been evident at the festival. Few films have demonstrated the mastery that Dey does here, even as he plays the twin roles of director and lead actor (the other lead is Sagnik Koley). What seems necessary in a short sketch is a bigger picture, a mastery over something very large even as what is produced is a small but sharply done part of that bigger canvas. As the two bumbling filmmakers struggle, saying ‘not that, not that’ even as they search for the form that works for them, the canvas ranges from Mrinal Sen and Utpalendu Chakraborty to the paintings of Bikash Bhattacharya.It is strange that In Search of Buddha has been pulled out from not one but two festivals: earlier this year the South Asian Short Film Festival had more or less offered the same excuse: absence of permission from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. The producer of the film, Rajendra Paramanik, who is here, is an economics professor who has no real connection with the cinema, He put up his own money after he overheard his student discuss the film with Dey, and is as much at a loss as anyone else as to just why this comedy of two bumbling filmmakers seeing their truth in history could possibly harm or threaten anyone.The poster of ‘Parliament Street’.Likewise Parliament Street, also in limbo. Set in Delhi, inside a beloved art space named People Tree, started in 1991 by the noted artist Orijit Sen along with Gurpreet Sidhu, which is now closing, the film has the whimsical humour one has come to be associated with both Bannerjee and Sen. The film is expansive, as is its description of the geography of Delhi that surrounds the street. As an anonymous voice takes us through longer, occasionally grimmer, histories (the film begins with the assasination of Indira Gandhi), memory extends into diverse kinds of creative, sometimes anarchic, energy. There is music, there is grim humour, there are occasional stretches of political darkness (Jantar Mantar, next door, is especially remembered as activists over the years found refuge – or simply a toilet – in this space). What there is not is anything like a cinema of lurking political danger, any incitement to violence, or any threat to national security.Sankaraa’s The Mali and the Parasite is rather more grim: located in Sijimali, in Odisha, where permission to mine the forests for bauxite by the Vedanta group is being fiercely fought by the tribals. The footage is remarkable: it captures the sweep of the land alongside the scale of threatened ecological damage. Most significant perhaps is the way it captures – and overcomes – many standard anxieties of political cinema: of reportage, the assuaging of political guilt, the exploitative propensities of films about a people made for another set of people – through unusual strategies that move beyond the observational and into didacticism proper. The poster of ‘The Mali and the Parasite.’Afiya Khalid and Rizwan Rahman’s Sanitised Republic likewise produces yet another genre of the documentary: a form that departs from the observational, moves through tragic structures and eventually lands at the possibilities of, not catharsis, but organization. The film is about sanitation workers associated with a single hospital in Delhi in the months of COVID. It begins with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chilling line ‘Aaj raat bara baje se gharonse bahar nikalne par poori pabandi lagayi jaa rahi hai (from midnight tonight, a full ban on leaving homes),’ moving through a series of direct-to-camera testimonies to eventually land at the workers’ hesitant moves towards unionisation. Both films are clearly situated within – but also extend – documentary cinema in what we might call the growing challenges of the post-truth era, when the credibility of the documentary image is perhaps lower than it has ever been. One film moves towards the didactic, the other towards the tragic. But both come together to address this central question: how to handle the problem of authenticity? How, in short, to get the voices of its subjects to be able to speak for themselves? This is a growing challenge for documentary filmmakers everywhere. Here that challenge is met through audacious means: through the use of text, through occasional voiceover and, always, the mixing of spoken audio with both music and effects. All four of the films I mention are as significant as any in the festival. All are candidates for possible jury recognition. Why ban them? Can the illegitimacy of state censorship be further compounded by the incomprehensibility of its actions? It is worth perhaps tagging the curious history of this informal structure of prior permission with the Information & Broadcasting Ministry. Historically, both suspension and revocation of already-issued Censor certificates have been a part of the original Cinematograph Act of 1952. In 2021, however, as the draft revisions to that Act were published, it was a yet-further amendment to that right – to Section 6(1) of the Act – that had created alarm. This was the notorious ‘super-censor’ clause, allowing the Union government, if it received a reference concerning a certified film, to essentially cancel any film’s certification and send it back for re-certification. This clause was eventually withdrawn, being seen to be violative of the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in the K.M. Shankarappa judgment that had held that the government could not exercise such revisional power over a film after the certification process.For 50 years after Independence, film festivals were historically seen to be a special case, autonomous from the censorship mechanism. This changed after 2003 when the Mumbai International Film Festival, which had programmed several films made in the wake of the Gujarat riots of 2002, amended its rules to insist on a censor certificate from its Indian participants, and saw a major reaction from filmmakers across the country. It is hard to date the moment when the workaround of prior permission began, but it is perhaps safe to say that it has come into widespread use following the 2023 amendment to the Cinematograph Act. Whenever it came into being, it essentially exists today as a workaround for the failure of the ‘super-censor’ clause, and has become a direct governmental measure that entirely bypasses the Censor Board. While it was initially seen as a quick-fix solution by festival organisers, its downside – now in full evidence in the IDSFFK – is that the Union government needs to provide no explanation for why, or under what clause, 31 (or perhaps five, seven, or eight) films have summarily and arbitrarily had their permission to screen withheld. These films need to be seen. They need their right to be screened to be reinstated, they need to be treated with respect and to be given their due – as valid and important contributions to the great traditions of Indian documentary cinema, which they continue to keep alive. Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film scholar, art curator and cultural theorist.