Far From Home: Ankita Kumar on Storytelling Across Borders

Journalist and filmmaker, Ankita M. Kumar has often been the only woman in the room with a voice. She tells Amy Boyle how she learned to keep speaking up, from a grandmother who crossed during Partition to covering India's COVID-19 crisis to making her Oscar-qualifying film, "Far From Home." A feminist conversation on resilience and cultural identity with Ankita, one of the inspirational women and female leaders proving that storytelling for social change starts with refusing to be silenced.

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Speaking of Phenomenal is created and produced by Amy Boyle. Podcast artwork by Amanda Eich. "Woman" by Tiffany Villarreal, used with permission. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review and share the podcast, and stay tuned for more inspiring conversations. Support the show with on Patreon.

Transcript

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[00:00:00] ANKITA: I was standing in the streets of Delhi with my equipment and my cinematographer was like, "What do we do?

[00:00:05] We are blowing up money with , nowhere to go." And I said, "Let's just shoot Delhi." 

[00:00:16] I lived in Delhi for a long time. I actually spent my 20s in Delhi. I moved to the US when I was 28. It was the first place where I built a home away from my family, where I could become Ankita.

[00:00:28] I wanted to write a love [00:00:30] letter to Delhi.

[00:00:31] I knew the neighborhoods I wanted to work in, and I knew where the Afghans lived. Uh, but what happened was that I live on the West Coast of America, and coordinating with India is very hard. I took calls like till 3:00 in the morning to talk to people in India.

[00:00:46] When my subject said she couldn't work with me because right before I arrived, she had done a video, uh, with some YouTuber, and he had put up the video without her consent.

[00:00:56] And, these kind of things happen in those parts of the world. People don't seek [00:01:00] consent. In America, we have all these, consent forms, and we ask people, you know, are you okay with us putting this up online?" In India, they don't do that. And the consequence of that was that her husband saw the video, and he was with the Taliban, and he said that, "I am going to find you and kill [00:01:15] you."

[00:01:16] She had four daughters. The husband had already sold two to the Taliban. She said, "I don't care, even if you are a, woman journalist or woman filmmaker, and you shoot me in the way I want to be shot, and take care of my daughters, uh, and [00:01:30] make sure that their faces are not shown.

[00:01:31] She said, "I still can't work with you because at this point I can't trust anybody."

[00:01:35] I had to take the call to not shoot with her.

[00:01:37] And at that time I didn't have a backup.

[00:01:47] AMY: She found one. The film she made anyway is Far From Home, the story of an Afghan refugee, Samira, waiting in Delhi for the UN to recognize her. It qualified for the Oscars, was a [00:02:00] Japan Prize finalist, and that award list continues to grow. This is the making of, what it cost to get that story on the screen, and Ankita gives us rare access.

[00:02:11] Today, she lets us in, her own behind the [00:02:15] scenes, not just the making of the film, but the making of the woman behind it, the journalist, the granddaughter, the filmmaker she fought to become. This is that story in her own [00:02:30] words. 

[00:02:31] ANKITA: My name is Ankita Kumar. I'm based in San Francisco, and I'm a documentary filmmaker. I am a Medill alum and I, have been a journalist for almost, 15 years. 

[00:02:42] For me, phenomenal just means [00:02:45] being passionate about anything that you do. And I feel that I find extraordinary in the ordinary. Uh, and for me that means someone's really passionate about what they do, going to work or taking care of their plants, their kids, their animals, anything, [00:03:00] right?

[00:03:00] So, that is, phenomenal.

[00:03:03] I covered the COVID crisis for multiple publications in India. I was primarily covering the crisis for a German broadcaster called DW, Deutsche Welle. I had this urge to bring these stories [00:03:15] to life of people who were really suffering, and, and were falling through the cracks.

[00:03:21] Nobody cared about them, , not even the government. And there was this expectation that you adjust to this pandemic, in ways that it's not [00:03:30]possible for you to adjust. So I think for me, covering the pandemic made me realize that it's so important to be human./

[00:03:39] It was incredibly frustrating at the start because, I, I felt the sense of privilege that [00:03:45] I could go out.

[00:03:45] I had a press pass, I could go out, and normal people couldn't. And, uh, it was incredibly frustrating. But then I realized that privilege came with a sense of responsibility. And I saw their life for what it really was, and it made me realize, you know, how [00:04:00] privileged I was in my space, uh, as an educated woman who had a roof over her head. There were people who did not know what they will eat tomorrow. Uh, they did not know how they'll, how they'll survive the next day./

[00:04:11] I actually realized during the pandemic that there were, so many spaces where I was the [00:04:15] only woman in the room, and, the only woman in the room with a voice.

[00:04:20] That was a big realization for me. I remember I went to cover a story, into a very, very interior part of India. That's a part of India, the urban girl in me [00:04:30] would never go to. We took a boat and by the river, went into a kind of a, flood land.

[00:04:35] And it was so remote that the people had no idea who we were. And we had to even explain that we were journalists. I saw all these women, you know, looking at me, and they had never seen a woman go to work. And they [00:04:45] looked at me and they were like, "Wow, women can do this?" And I said, "Yeah, we can totally do this. We can do whatever we want to do." And they were so surprised. It was a kind of a village where women didn't even use menstrual, pads or tampons or anything. They had no awareness about these [00:05:00] things. So, you know, I had a chat with them.

[00:05:02] I was trying to understand their issues. I felt this huge responsibility weighing on my shoulders that I have to keep doing what I do. I cannot give up and I cannot sit at home one day and say, "I don't want to do this," because there are so many women who get inspired when they [00:05:15] see someone like me.

[00:05:16] And the pandemic gave me that exposure to those parts of the world where I would have never gone to as a woman growing up in a big city, like a Mumbai or a Delhi. And I grew up in Toronto as well, so I'd never had an exposure to those, uh, those [00:05:30] situations. I realized it's so important for women to work, and it's so important for us to have a voice, because in most rooms we don't. I feel like, there was a lot of pent-up rage inside me from some ancestor. I always used to feel like somebody was, you know, holding my head down in the water and trying [00:05:45] to choke me when they tried to silence me.

[00:05:47] I was very loud, very vocal about my opinions, very politically charged. Did not fly very well with my family, and they always used to wonder why I was this weird, and why I would not shut up, [00:06:00] or I- why I would not speak in a lower tone, or why I would not, like, behave like the other girls. So I think it stems from that.

[00:06:07] I had this deep urge to always speak up for the truth and speak up for people when nobody wanted to. I [00:06:15] actually hate seeing injustice. I would always speak up, even if it made people uncomfortable. Like, for example, when I was growing up, , my grandmother was very traditional.

[00:06:23] There was , this one time my grandmother and I were walking on the street, and there was this elderly person who came to meet us, and I touched his feet, because in [00:06:30] my culture, we touch the feet of our elders. And my grandmother got offended and said, "He's from a lower caste compared to us, so you cannot touch his feet."

[00:06:38] So I got really angry and I said, "Well, you know, if I have to disrespect people based on their, birth, which is just so [00:06:45] random, and where you take birth doesn't define who you are." Then I said, "By that logic, since you're so discriminatory, I don't want to touch your feet, either." And she was furious, and she said, "This is the, this is why women should not get educated.

[00:06:56] This is why you, open your minds too much." These things used to happen a [00:07:00] lot to me when I was growing up. And, the first opportunity that I got to work, I just worked, and I was like, "I'll work as hard as I can, and I'll, be a journalist, and I will speak up, keep speaking up, and till I can't, till one day somebody decides to just end it for me, but [00:07:15] till then I'll keep doing my job."

[00:07:18] I used to do a full-time job. I actually was a product manager at Politico. I was working on the launch of their app. I have my little production company now. I'm the only employee as of today. [00:07:30] So it's a small thing. , I manage it on my own, and I take up as many projects as I can. I see myself as the kind of person who loves to do full-time work, but also wants to do different things to, boost my need for learning.

[00:07:43] I want to learn [00:07:45] as much as I can, and that's the reason I do multiple things at once. So I, love to do reporting. I write, for several publications. I recently wrote an opinion piece. I'm also working on a solutions journalism story, but then I'm also working on video stuff.

[00:08:02] Last year I moved to LA for six months, and I worked on indie film sets and, on music videos as, assistant to the camera. I did that. Uh, I'm working part-time at a camera shop trying to learn different things about different kinds of [00:08:15] equipment. So I think it's very difficult to put me in a box, which is why I decided to move away from full-time work three years ago and focus on, becoming myself, which I feel was not possible for me to do in a full-time job./

[00:08:32] AMY: That instinct to keep speaking when she was told not to came from somewhere specific. It came from her grandmother. 

[00:08:43] ANKITA: Her name was Pratima [00:08:45] Mukhopadhyay. She never told us her real name. She changed her name to, match with my grandfather. My grandfather's name was Pranab, so she changed her name to Pratima, with P-R, to just make the name similar.

[00:08:57] I actually don't know her real name. Even my dad [00:09:00] doesn't. That's how complicated partition is. There's some people who just erase their identities, you know, after coming to India. She came to India as a young, girl actually.

[00:09:12] I love her, and I don't love some parts of her [00:09:15] So the parts of her, I love are her resilience and her fight to, you know, survive. She never went to school, uh, because there were a lot of, um, religious riots going around the, her neighborhood when she was growing up.

[00:09:26] She was incredibly wealthy, and she was, very [00:09:30] privileged. So she had tutors at home, which is rare back in the day. And that's the part I don't like about her, wealth and privilege and the fact that she still retained the arrogance even after losing it all.

[00:09:40] She was this very complicated woman, and then she came here experiencing a lot of [00:09:45] grief, at losing all her family wealth and losing one sister, , a - seeing mobs kill people, you know. They, they did not leave their homes till the last minute because they thought things would change, and people, you know, mobs came to kill them.

[00:09:57] And it's, this is a story across the world with [00:10:00] refugee communities, you don't believe things are going to go bad, and one fine day somebody knocking at your door who wants to kill you, and then you make a run for it. And you run with whatever little you can hold in your hands. And, she didn't have many things with her when she came to India as a young girl.

[00:10:13] She got married very late because she was [00:10:15] not able to find a partner, , because they, her family couldn't give any dowry, any money to a guy. And my grandfather was also, extremely poor. My grandfather was so poor that when he and his five brothers came to India, they used to live in a factory, and all five brothers used to wear the same [00:10:30] shirt.

[00:10:32] I cannot sit still. In a lot of days when I feel the urge to run, and that comes from her.

[00:10:37] I know that because it's the urge to run away from problems, from situations, from, a mob, anything that's trying to, you know, kill us. [00:10:45]So I know it's come from her. wrote that story, and I saw a lot of her in Samira, the Afghan woman I worked with. Because Samira also actually came from a wealthy family, and then they lost all their money because of the Taliban that burned down their shops, and then they became poor [00:11:00] overnight, and then they were struggling there.

[00:11:01] They were middle class in Kabul, and then they came to India, and now they are, they have no source of income So I saw a lot of my grandmother in her possessiveness with her things and, the desire to have an education for the next generation also comes from [00:11:15] access to that in the past./

[00:11:16] I believe- ... in a higher power guiding us through. And I feel like maybe somewhere down the line my grandmother wanted her story to be told, and uh, so she directed me to a character who mirrored a lot of her life experiences. And it was very easy for me to [00:11:30] talk to Samira. It's very hard to build a relationship with somebody within three days, and I could only do that because I felt like I understood her more than anybody else because I know what it means to be that person who is suffering from a health problem.

[00:11:43] My grandmother had [00:11:45] health, , issues throughout her life. She had, early menopause , at the age of 25 because of the trauma she went through during Partition. That's why my father doesn't have any siblings. My grandmother struggled with arthritis throughout her life. She also had a lot of other, uh, health problems that [00:12:00] went unaddressed.

[00:12:00] Samira was going through a big health crisis, a neurological health crisis. I didn't let that take precedence on, on the story because if I would've talked about the health problem, that would have become larger than the film actually, was. So I [00:12:15] couldn't really talk about it.

[00:12:18] I don't involve my family a lot in my work. I stopped involving them right after the pandemic because I realized there was not much support there, and they did not understand my work that [00:12:30] much.

[00:12:30] I actually had no support system when I went to Delhi. , The only person I could talk to was , my husband, and he lived so far away. He was in the US, and I couldn't talk to him. And, it was very lonely. It's sort of this expectation that my parents have that, your job is always [00:12:45] secondary. You have to figure out a way to make everything work, and you have to prioritize your family. You have to prioritize your parents. You have to prioritize your husband, brother, everybody, but not yourself or your job.

[00:12:54] That makes you selfish. I would like to share this incident that happened with me and my mother-in-law when [00:13:00] I was working on Far From Home.

[00:13:01] My husband flew down to India. It was festival of Diwali, and we were celebrating it with family. And my father-in-law had passed away the year before, so my mother-in-law was already not in a good space. She wanted us to all be together.

[00:13:14] The day before [00:13:15] Diwali, I had to work on the edit of Far From Home, and things took longer than expected, and I ended up coming at home late into the night. And my mother-in-law was very, very angry at me because I missed the, uh, important functions that come with Diwali and all the things that is expected of a [00:13:30] daughter-in-law in Indian society.

[00:13:31] She was very upset. My husband was very upset, and I had to sit down and explain to my husband that this is not going to work if you're going to get upset at me for doing my job. And this is how it is. Like, I can, you know, take one day off to celebrate with my family, but I [00:13:45] can't be there every day.

[00:13:46] You know, these things, they can happen any time. And he was very understanding. I realized, you know, I'm on a very lonely journey, so all I can do is look for allies in my sector, who can help me in these kind of situations, and I've started doing that, and I encourage other women to do that as [00:14:00]well.

[00:14:02] AMY: That inheritance, the urge to run, the inability to just watch is exactly what Ankita brought into a small room in Delhi with a camera.

[00:14:13]

[00:14:17] AMY: Samira didn't require a lot of convincing. She herself wanted to talk to a journalist. At that point of, , time she felt very wronged by the UNHCR. And I think my film is one of those rare films that [00:14:30] touches upon the UNHCR and how their processes really affect refugees, 'cause people in their heads have this wonderful image of the UNHCR.

[00:14:38] They are doing , good work, but there are a lot of processes that are being followed that are, [00:14:45] affecting people's lives and taking away years from their life, and that's exactly what happened with Samira. She landed in India in March 2021. She, it was over a year and a half, and she was waiting for her interview for the white card which the UN, [00:15:00] the refugee agency gives it to you acknowledging that your claim for asylum is valid.

[00:15:05] There's a scene in the film, her husband's is, chopping potatoes on the side, and she's talking about, this man who was threatening her, uh, while, when she used to [00:15:15] go to work in Kabul.

[00:15:16] And I think she was very comfortable, talking to us because, my cinematographer, he just disappeared. It was a very small space, and I don't know how he disappeared, that Samira forgot he was even shooting her. And she was talking to me like she would talk to a [00:15:30] friend.

[00:15:30] If you would talk about something bad that happened to us in the past. She was just talking to me, shaking her hands and talking about this is what happened, this is why I'm so unwell. And you see that in the film, that the casualness with which she's talking about this situation, without getting too overly emotional.

[00:15:44] It's sort of just like a [00:15:45] conversation between friends. And I think that happened because he was able to disappear, and he also, he came up with the idea of getting the husband to chop the potatoes in that small space. So the husband was there, and she's there, and she just became comfortable 'cause it just [00:16:00] felt like her house space.

[00:16:02] I'm very grateful that I found a cinematographer. he's gone with an alias for the film because he's a Muslim, and in India it's incredibly difficult to be Muslim right now and tell these kind of stories. So [00:16:15] it is very, very brave of him to work with me./

[00:16:18] I put out a request on Twitter of all places. And at that time Twitter used to be Twitter, not X. I tried every platform. I was looking for the right person. , And, somebody I had known several years ago, put me in a WhatsApp [00:16:30] group. "Put your request in here." And I was very taken aback, but in India it's very common to just put people into WhatsApp groups with 500 people. It's very normal. And by that time I was too American. I was like, "I don't wanna be added to a WhatsApp group with 500 people, gonna get [00:16:45] spammed every day." I wanted my cinematographer to either be a woman or be from the same faith as my subjects. Uh, because even though I'm a woman, I don't really understand the challenges of being a Muslim in India. So I wanted somebody who had that understanding so that when I didn't, [00:17:00]that person could step in. I told my cinematographer, "If you ever feel that I'm coming from a position of power and privilege as a Hindu woman in India who doesn't know what it means to be persecuted, call me out, jump into the interview, and do it, do it," you know? I don't want this film [00:17:15] to, you know, feel like it's made by somebody who doesn't have any idea about what it means to be a Muslim.

[00:17:24] I get nightmares about my unused footage. I dream about it. I'm [00:17:30] like, "What if I change, put that into my story?" I always think of the different iterations of Far From Home. Like, what would have happened if I would have chosen this pathway and put this person in instead of that person?

[00:17:43] That, I had [00:17:45] to not just kill my darlings, I had to kill a part of myself there was this one particular woman, , Vahida. She was a gym instructor, and we had some great footage of her working out in the gym. And I really wanted to put that in the film because I wanted to dispel the [00:18:00]myth that people had about Afghans.

[00:18:02] I know a lot of people who know Afghans know this, but I didn't know this, and I'm sure a lot of people probably don't. Afghans love going to the gym. They are fit. , They go to the gym almost every day. It's like a [00:18:15] religion for them. So that's why we have gym sequences in the film.

[00:18:19] , But the women go to the gym, too. Uh, and the woman I was working with, Vahida, she actually , was running her own gym in Kabul, and the Taliban came to power, so that's why she fled, and she was actually working at a gym in India. [00:18:30] And her plan was to open her own gym once she went to a better country where she could, that was business friendly.

[00:18:35] It was so much fun working with her. She had some interesting stories to talk about, her journey as a gym instructor and the kind of people she met and, people's perception [00:18:45] of women's health.

[00:18:45] , But I couldn't put it in my film.

[00:18:47] I still feel very bad about it. Hopefully next time I'll get, I'll find a way to work with her again.

[00:18:52] Let's see. Fingers crossed.

[00:18:55]

[00:18:59] AMY: [00:19:00] That guilt, the hard drive she couldn't put down, sits next to something bigger.

[00:19:04] It's what almost pulled her away from filmmaking altogether. 

[00:19:09] ANKITA: I don't want to be an activist at this point of time in my life. I definitely want to be a filmmaker. There was a [00:19:15] big part of my career when I wanted to be an activist because I saw so much injustice happening around me. So during COVID, I actually was moonlighting as sort of like a public servant dash activist.

[00:19:27] I formed a group with, a lot of, activists, [00:19:30] journalists, and lawyers. it was called, the COVID Action Group. There was a second wave of COVID in India in 2021, and we were working on getting people hospital beds, oxygen, Remdesivir, which is a medicine that was being used to treat COVID [00:19:45] patients at that time, and there was a scarcity of that in India.

[00:19:47] It's a country of over a billion people, and almost every house had an infection. It was so bad. It was a disaster that the government mismanaged at multiple levels. And I was working with people to do that, but that broke me, [00:20:00] Amy, because there was this point where we had these Google Sheets, and we were - tracking the patients, we were also calling the hospital because the hospitals are not giving update about the patients.

[00:20:08] Hospitals are disposing of bodies without telling the families. So you're tracking those. And there was this one day we were [00:20:15] marking the dead people in gray. And this one day on that sheet, marked over 100 people gray because they all died in one day. And I'd spoken to over 100 families who were grieving somebody they lost.

[00:20:28] And I just thought to myself, there's only [00:20:30] so much I can do. And I can't do more than that. And it broke me.

[00:20:39] I actually had to go to therapy for a long time. I had to rebuild myself and value myself because I [00:20:45] realized I let go of myself doing all of that.

[00:20:47] I still want to do good for people, so if I ever get an opportunity to, you know, uh, send a girl to school... I actually funded, the education of three women, , three rape survivors during the pandemic. I funded their education. If I ever get [00:21:00] an opportunity to do that, I would love to do it. Uh, but I don't think I want to be actively an activist.

[00:21:05] I really appreciate those who are, because it takes a lot of courage. You have to be made of some kind of steel that's not found on this planet to be an activist. I don't [00:21:15] think I'm made of that. Not at this point, no. 

[00:21:18] AMY: I think you are, but I think what you went through is more than most humans could ever bear.

[00:21:27] ANKITA: It's hard because, , you know, when you hold [00:21:30]onto all these hard d- hard drives of people's lives, you feel incredibly responsible for telling them in a way that doesn't, , hamper their lives.

[00:21:39] Because this is something, , a very senior journalist had told me, when I was working on [00:21:45] this film, that, "You are going to finish this film and you will leave India. Think about what's going to happen to them. So be very, very responsible about what you're doing with their footage." And, that is the reason I decided to interview a member of, India's [00:22:00] political party, leading political party, the BJP.

[00:22:02] And I got him in the film because I wanted to get the government's perspective as well, on the refugee crisis in India. You don't want your work to suffer because you have this sense of, um, innate justice and you don't want the [00:22:15] people to suffer. So I feel it's very difficult, um, to weigh those. And I think anybody who's working with these kind of communities has to weigh those options.

[00:22:24] AMY: After everything, Ankita chose filmmaking over [00:22:30]activism. Her next film is about music, her first feature documentary, Divinity 2.0.

[00:22:42] ANKITA: I am actually working on a documentary on, [00:22:45]two artists, two singers, Aishwarya and 

[00:22:48] Saundarya It's a story of, women singers in a male-dominated environment. The story stems from my personal, upbringing. My mom wanted me to be a singer.

[00:22:56] It's a very personal story. So I, I see a lot of myself in these, girls. [00:23:00] So, they are two sisters. They come from a huge legacy, and they are trying to build their own, life in this kind of a circuit. My film is looking at the expectations that are, that women instrumentalists and singers face in today's [00:23:15] society, where even though we have evolved as a community when it comes to our music, especially the traditional classical arts, we haven't really evolved that much.

[00:23:23] The audience is still very different in their thinking. They still want women to conform to a certain image. So this [00:23:30] is what Divinity is looking at. It's looking at how divine music changes its form with generation and how we can modernize it for the next generation.

[00:23:41] AMY: Is there an image or a detail from the last three [00:23:45]years something big or small that you still think about that you haven't made or written yet? 

[00:23:55] ANKITA: I do have a lot of ideas. One thing I do want to work on in the next few years [00:24:00] is write a book I feel a calling to write a fiction book, and I have a lot of characters that keep coming to me.

[00:24:07] I do know I want a neurodivergent kid at the center of my story because I was, neurodivergent growing up, and I was never acknowledged, and I grew up in a society where [00:24:15] nobody got me. they never understood me, so I want a neurodivergent kid at the center of it.

[00:24:20] So maybe you might see me writing a book in a couple of years.

[00:24:23]

[00:24:26] AMY: Ankita, thank you so much for trusting me with your story today. The [00:24:30] way you're willing to sit with the weight of your work as well as your accolades is rare,

[00:24:34] and I am grateful for your willingness to share all of it.

[00:24:38] ANKITA: I realized it's so important for women to work, and it's so important for us to have a voice, because in most rooms we [00:24:45] don't. 

[00:24:45] AMY: If this episode has meant something to you, please share it. And if you haven't already, a like, a follow, or a five-star review helps more people find our community and genuinely means the world to me. And something we're doing differently this season, there's a voicemail link in the top of the [00:25:00] show notes.

[00:25:00] I listen to every single one. We've also launched a newsletter twice a month with stories and reflections that don't make the episodes. You can sign up on our website or over on Instagram. Until next time, I'm Amy Boyle, and this is the [00:25:15] Speaking of Phenomenal podcast.