When I shot the documentary in 2011, I had three other ideas. I was going to make one every subsequent year. Of course, I took three years just to get the first one out. When I did get it out, I felt a huge sense of relief and, mostly involuntarily, gave up on making another for the several years. Around early 2020, the ever present guilt over inaction made ripples that were becoming hard to ignore.
One
of those three ideas was to document a handful of individuals with a
history of engaging in activism: how they saw society pan out over
decades and how they feel about the present day and the future. It was
Comrade Thiyagu who had inspired this idea to begin with. It was only
right, then, that I started with him. I had a couple of others that I wanted to interview the same week but couldn't. The next three years went by like a blur and eventually I figured I'll just publish the interview as is and not wait until I re-start the doc (let alone finish it).
The interview was done over two days in Semmoɻi Poonga in February 2020. First, there were technical issues with day one's audio recording. To make matters worse, there were issues with the files themselves, and I got confused over where I stored my backups. I had all but given up on recovering these files until I located them accidentally on a backup drive a few weeks ago.
In the nearly five intervening years, so many others have interviewed him, and I see he's been just as generous with them in going over his life's story at length. There's a strong sense of redundancy but I think the interview I did still has some content that's somewhat unique, which justified the decision to upload it despite its shortcomings.
Day one's audio is fairly AI-processed and layered with a secondary audio source (which is also AI-processed; sigh). It's also misaligned towards the end. I uploaded it anyway—not rendering it all over again.
Day two is yet to be reviewed. I don't see many edits.
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