Nisha Pahuja on her deeply challenging journey documenting one Indian family's fight for justice

Cutaways is a personal essay series where filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This TIFF 2022 edition by Nisha Pahuja focuses on her film To Kill a Tiger, which follows an Indian family's quest for justice after the assault of their teenage daughter.

Content warning: this article contains discussions of sexual assault.

It's hard to focus today. It's one of the last days of summer and I'm in the park. There's a wonderful young dad playing soccer with his little girl, and they're utterly delightful and distracting. And also, soccer balls have an uncanny way of finding my head...

I should move, but I'm a creature of habit, and this table under this tree is my favourite spot in the park — central enough to feel like I'm inside it but removed enough to observe. A safe distance. My friends tell me this is how I move through the world — but without any trace of elegant stealth.

For me, this vantage point and my need for it are undoubtedly tied to being an immigrant. Far from being a loss or a hardship (though the immigrant experience is necessarily tinged with those hues), it is a gift. There's something about existing in nebulous and imagined spaces, in blurry geographies, that forces one to ask questions about power and history, meaning and change.

These tend to be the questions at the heart of all my films — including To Kill a Tiger, my latest documentary. To Kill a Tiger tells the story of Ranjit, a poor farmer in Jharkhand, India, who takes on the fight of his life after his 13-year-old daughter is gang-raped.

The villagers in his community demand that Ranjit marry his daughter to one of the rapists. But he refuses, and the film follows his family's quest for justice. It's a journey marked by extreme hardship and danger, given the importance of community and honour in the society Ranjit comes from.

I hadn't set out to make this film. I was, in fact, making a different film — a broader look at toxic masculinity in India called Send Us Your Brother. Ranjit's story was meant to be the spine of that film.

I filmed in India for three and a half years, following three interconnected narrative threads — those of Ranjit, activist Mahendra Kumar, and two young boys, Karan and Ashish, who are being "reprogrammed" by Mahendra in an effort to create more progressive Indian men.

After such a long filming period, one amasses a lot of material. And fortunately — or unfortunately for us — much of that material was incredibly powerful. It made letting go of the old film very hard for us. We contemplated a three-hour film and a series, but after showing an assembly to colleagues, it was clear that what we had were two separate films — and that Ranjit's story, driven as it was by a very dramatic narrative, needed to exist in its own filmic universe.

Accepting that was painful but also liberating. It allowed us to do justice to the other people in the story, including his wife and his extraordinary daughter, "J," who really is the heart of To Kill a Tiger.

Filming J was a huge ethical dilemma for me. I've filmed sensitive content before, but I've never filmed a child-rape survivor. My original plan was to mask her identity in post, but everything we tried (animation; blurring; giving her a new face, like in Welcome to Chechnya) felt wrong and unethical. So much of the film is about the stigma of rape and how shameful it is perceived to be for the victim, and so the idea of hiding her felt like we were perpetuating the very prejudice we were critiquing.

By the time we'd finished To Kill a Tiger, J had turned 18. Her parents had no issue with her being seen or named in the film — but they felt, as did everyone involved, that the final decision had to be hers to make.

After she and the family watched the film, I called them on Zoom. It was a moment I won't forget for a long time. They didn't have to say anything: I knew.

The next day, J and I had a long conversation. She told me that the reason she agreed to be identified was because of how proud she was of her 13-year-old self. She said that she wanted to celebrate the courage of that girl. I do, too. And I can't wait for audiences to meet her.

Although J is identified in the film, I decided to not name or show her in any publicity materials, and I've asked the media and the public to do the same. It's a request that I struggled with. But it never felt right to identify her outside the film — and I think I finally understand why.

For me, To Kill a Tiger is actually its own world, and what we did as a crew was provide a space for her that was safe. In that world, it feels right and moral to see her as she is. Outside of it, however, my instinct is to guard her privacy until the day she chooses to speak publicly. It's a day that I hope will come.

Now that the film is done, it feels right — as though what the story needed to be always existed and was simply waiting to be found.

There is real beauty and real truth in simplicity, but to find it, especially through the documentary form, is to take many roads. You have to do all those roads justice before finding the final path. This was a long journey indeed, but it unfolded as it had to. Ultimately, all journeys do.

This year's Toronto International Film Festival runs September 8–18. Find showtimes for To Kill a Tiger here.

Missed it at TIFF? Catch it at the Atlantic International Film Festival (September 15–22).