‘Marching in the Dark’ review: A moving account of a woman farmer coping with suicide and neglect

Kinshuk Surjan’s Marching in the Dark is dedicated to the women farmers whose husbands and sons have killed themselves over the past two decades. Surjan’s Marathi-language debut documentary profiles one such woman from Maharashtra, who bears with heroic courage the burden of sudden widowhood in a conservative milieu.

The context for Sanjivani Bhure’s precarious situation is deftly laid out in the opening scenes. At an auction, cultivators are paid a pittance for their produce.

Farmers never get what they deserve, remarks an elderly man. We then meet the embodiment of the consequences of this unfair rate fixing.

Sanjivani is hard at work in a field, harvesting the first of several crops that she hopes will improve her family’s fortunes. With a son and daughter to worry about after her debt-ridden husband’s death by suicide, Sanjivani turns to counselling sessions run by a non-governmental group for women like her.

In the women’s anger and anguish, their frustration but also their fortitude, Sanjivani finds the strength to not only cope with her own pain, but also seek alternatives to farming. “Marching in the Dark” turns out to be an inadequate translation of the film’s Marathi title Andharatlya Mashali, or Flames in the Darkness.

The 105-minute documentary is being shown at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October...

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