Waiting as a universal human experience – short film about Indian bureaucracy successful at the RAI Film Festival

Ikuno Naka, Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Garima Jaju, Smuts Research Fellow at Cambridge University, talk about filming bureaucracy, waithood and the workings of the state in India. Their recent work – an ethnographic short film titled Reception Room, Wing D – was showcased as part of the UK Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, where the film received Honourable Mention for the Marsh Short Film Prize.

Could you tell me how you came together to make the documentary? Did any particular event spark off the project?
Back in 2015/2016, we were both in India doing ethnographic research for our PhD. And we were finding ourselves spending a lot of our time just sitting in waiting rooms, of all kinds. Often, we overlook these moments waiting-about for something…because they are precisely just that…“for” something. But really, we were finding that these spaces were more than just that…that they were filled with all kinds of activity and hustlings, emotions (anger, anxiety, hope), exchanges of humour, imaginations, etc, and it is this that we wanted to capture. 

Our film project is set in a small reception room of the Delhi Development Authority, the main government body for public housing and land development in India’s capital, New Delhi. We have been filming in this same room, on and off, in the years since. Change has happened over this time, even in the seemingly lumbering slowness that is bureaucracy: receptionists have come, some have gone, others retired. At the same time, the state has progressively been digitized and the bureaucratic body has shrunk in its size and scope with the outsourcing of bureaucratic work to private companies and the hiring of staff on fixed-term contracts. And amidst all this change, the public continues to come and go. 

Our longitudinal project, set in the decade of Prime Minister Modi’s “business-friendly” regime, is, then, quite simply a visual archive of a steadily privatizing state, and an effort to capture traces of an older and different imagination of the state, one in which the state is remembered as a public good, responsible for the care of its citizens. 

What is your short film about?
The film is an invitation for deep observation of the everyday hustle of the ordinary public officers and the ordinary public who collide here, in this unassuming reception room of a major government office. All kinds of people, files, rumours, gossip, and boxes of sweets circulate through the room, on their way to the bureaucratic labyrinth beyond. What is striking, sitting long hours in the waiting room, is the unrelenting efforts of ordinary people in identifying the right person, behind the right desk, with the right power to help move their plea along. This search – to find, address, and persuade – is not merely procedural; it’s also deeply political. 

So moving beyond more institutionalized portrayals of bureaucracy, we wanted to use film to cast our focus instead on bureaucracy in the everyday: the small victories and failures, the humour and anxiety, the fleeting friendships and latent tensions between people and things that make up the “real” state as encountered by people. In so doing, the hope has been to draw out an intimate and lively portrait of bureaucratic work and the deeply personal way in which political claims are made and negotiated.

What was the process of making the short like?
This film is a piece of fiction as much as it is a piece of non-fiction. Our protagonists – the receptionists Kamala, Savitri, Sujata, and Suresh as well as the head reception officer Rajesh – were all performing in their own ways to the camera. They came to the project with their own ideas about what should be filmed and what should be told. Rajesh, the head receptionist, gathered us in his office and read out poetry written by him, engaging the camera directly. At lower octanes than this, the receptionists Kamala and Savitri were also quite specific about what was for “shooting”, and how the state and its matters should be portrayed. 
 
And hopefully, this exercise of collaboration that shaped the filming extends out now to the audience too, in sharing in this more universal and human experience of occupying some in-between space and continually striving to get out of it. The different kinds of people we meet on the way, the information we try to gather, the time-passed…hopefully, the film incites some larger reflections of the experience of waiting than just the immediate backdrop of waiting within the small Reception Room of Wing D. 

Trailer to the film: https://raifilm.org.uk/films/reception-room-wing-d/