The Wings of Tragedy

And while making Bhopal:The Search For Justice (2004),Raymont was hardly inclined towards objectivity or diplomacy. “Though we seek out and present facts in our documentaries,we make films with a strong point of view. We do work hard to be fair in making our passionate arguments for justice and human rights,” says Raymont. The reason why he wanted his work to be the voice of victims runs deeper than just his predilection for human rights. “Harold accessed the files of New Delhi-based lawyer activist Indira Jaisingh. We became familiar with the unresolved cases that worsened the plight of survivors who had lost family members and were denied compensation,” recounts Raymont. Tracey spent weeks in Bhopal trying to take widows,graveyard workers,and government officials into confidence. The picture that was so fresh in the minds of these Bhopal residents twenty years after the tragedy was nothing sort of nightmarish. Something that convinced Raymont that there was no going back on the path he had already started out in. A few years on,his concern has anything but diluted.

“While it is widely agreed that the primary responsibility for the death of 20,000 innocent people rests with Union Carbide Corporation (now Dow Chemical),we were shocked and angered to find that,20 years after the disaster,the government of India had still not distributed the settlement money paid to the Indian government in trust. This international scandal had still not been addressed,25 years after the gas poisoning. The people of Bhopal are twice victims of profound injustice,” says Raymont.

Thomas Weidenbach
Germany
Fifteen years after the Bhopal tragedy,Thomas Weidenbach,was preparing a TV-documentary for the German and French public television on environmental disasters. “I am a journalist and filmmaker for more than 25 years and specialis in environmental issues. I remembered well the horrible pictures which were shot during the first few days days after the accident,” says Weidenbach.

The award-winning German filmmaker,however,was all prepared to hit the nail right on its head. The privations of the victims were known to most of the world,Weidenbach tried to infuse a sense on responsibility in the functioning of MNCs in developing countries by trying to gauge the reaction of the people responsible for the tragedy. “I was mainly interested in the reactions of the people in charge in the chemical industry. Also how the authorities were taking care of the injured and affected people and if a clean-up had taken place,” recounts Weidenbach about the making of MITGIFT – Aus Katastrophen lernen; Sevesco,Bhopal & Co.

The filming was preceded by thorough research that included interviews with physicians,engineers,lawyers and NGOs across the world and former workers in the Union Carbide-factory. “I even visited hospitals where victims were treated and the factory itself. I got intensive explanations on the ground by former technicians who had worked in the factory,interviewed representatives of the Indian Council for Medical Research and the Sambhavna Clinic which provides medical assistance for several victims. I also tried to interview former Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson,but I never got an answer from him although I contacted him several times in the US,” says the filmmaker.

While filming the documentary and talking to the family of the dead,Weidenbach realised that it was the whole chemical industry that tried to shirk responsibility of the disaster or the possibilities of the same elsewhere in future. And after a visit to the site so many years after the incident,Weidenbach was left wondering why a proper clean-up of the site was never done. “That could not have happened after an accident in an European factory and shows that international companies at least were working with double standards,” he concludes.

Sanford Lewis
USA
Bhopal and New England (USA) maybe worlds away,but resonance of tragedy travel far. In 2004,a New England company specializing in producing videos regarding corporate abuses made a campaign video that explored the consequences of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy. “I was requested to produce the video on behalf of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. We needed to find a way of encapsulating the lack of justice over the course of 20 years in a short documentary ,” says Sanford Lewis,Attorney and maker of the 17 minute documentary,Twenty Years Without Justice. The documentary includes interviews with gas survivors,the lawyer behind their historic lawsuit against Union Carbide,and a former engineer at the now-abandoned factory site.

“I examined various records books and videos related to Bhopal tragedy. I also interviewed the US-based lawyer for the Bhopal victims,Raj Sharma.I was able to interview two of the Bhopal victims during their visit to the US. We also were licensed to use footage and photographs from numerous sources,including the classic  black and white photographs of the disaster by Raghu Rai,” saysLewis. He had no intentions to make the documentary an objective analysis of the event. “We never attempted to produce an unbiased documentary; it is told from the perspective of the victims who feel that they have gone  20 years without justice,” says Lewis.