Overview

Rajasthan, in the past years, has been a big victim of calamities resulting from climate change. Some of these calamities repeatedly affecting the region have been hail storms and floods. UNICEF commissioned Decode Mediacom to visually document the happenings in the worst affected regions in southern Rajasthan. The subject of this film was disaster mitigation, during and after the calamity.

Project

However, the making of the films started six months after the calamities hit. Consequently, we did not have any real time footage available that could help us make the films. Because of this, a large portion of the films were based on interviews of the residents & beneficiaries of government schemes of these regions. This presented us the second challenge which was to make people open up about something that was devastating to their lives to say the least.

Resultantly, it took us a while to befriend the people and coax them into opening up, but once they did, both the challenges could be overcome. This was because they also shared a lot of footage of the calamities that they had recorded on their mobile phones. This, along with the footage sourced from the local media, proved quite useful to us. Also, once they became comfortable talking to us, stories of all kinds started pouring in. Another challenge was the unsaid responsibility of documenting the truth only. We had to ensure that no false claims were being made in the interviews, hence it was imperative that we do our research right and go into the details of the compensation shared, the processes etc

The movie was screened at Bricks Conference and proved to be influential in framing climate change policies that would directly affect the lives of millions. It was also posted on Rajasthan CM’s personal website.