Lights, camera…censorship! Film director Kamal Swaroop’s documentary film ‘Dance for Democracy’has been waiting for the approval of the censor board since the past 4 months .Ironically, the film was based on democracy. Swaroop is specially known for his ambitious film projects such as ‘Rangbhoomi’ and ‘Om darbadar’.

ThadomalShahani Centre for Media and Communication (TSCMC) organised an open discussion with the national award winning film maker as a part of #CMCEvenings, a platform to ‘connect over conversation’. The session aimed at enabling an ‘uncensored understanding’ of how the freedom to express and create is also affected by dictated filtration.

As a film maker, Swaroop’s main aim is to shock his audience with unpredictability and he has attempted to do the same in his movies. The discussion not only traced the history of censorship, but focused upon the influence of foreign cinema, the difference between art and craft, and the problems a film maker deal with while creating his film.

The Dance for Democracy was a record of the true political conflicts that took place, and Swaroop feels that the censor board’s opinion was abstract as they never could pin point the problem with the documentary. As far as his options to release the film are concerned, Swaroop put in that in this digital age, stopping a movie from reaching its viewers is very difficult. Swaroop concluded that while many considered the documentary to be too realistic, he believes that his “realism is that he did not interfere” with the film making.