Arvind Kejriwal giggled. Ten seconds later, he erupted into laughter again. And again. His party colleague Kumar Vishwas was trying to put his game face on to record an ad, but Kejriwal and the others kept chortling. This is one of several intimate scenes in a new documentary chronicling the rise and rise of Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). An Insignificant Man , which played at MAMI, is a deep, year-long look at a movement that became a party that stormed to electoral success in the Delhi 2013 elections.

“It was an off-the-cuff moment,” said Vinay Shukla, about the scene. “It’s not something you see in films, forget political documentaries.” Shukla and Khushboo Ranka made An Insignificant Man — filmed over 2012 and 2013 — an ethnographic account of sorts, of how a party was formed from the embers of a popular struggle. It began with a sense that a larger phenomenon was brewing that wasn’t really being captured by the news cycle.

“We decided to come to Delhi and try and see what they were doing; and when we got here, we realised there is something here that nobody else was shooting,” said Shukla. The party was simultaneously trying to figure itself out. “And that process, to us, was very exciting. To try and understand how a new political party is formed. Or, what it is that makes a politician.” Noble principles are one thing, but so are pragmatic compromises, and the film takes an unflinching look at the day-to-day machinations undergirding electoral politics. It’s a “meditative” account rather than a “hit and run” approach, its makers said.

“There aren’t that many political films you get to watch or that are made,” said Ranka. “It’s not just about lofty ideas and idealism. It’s also about the rituals of being a democracy, the absurdity of being a politician. We have tried to build all that into the story for a more complex narrative.” Political rallies, meetings to discuss ticket distribution, a sting operation, a hunger strike , and various other highlights feature in this 90-minute film distilled from more than 400 hours of footage.

“The most challenging thing was where to focus the camera and which person’s story to tell, whether the story was going to be relevant or not,” said Ranka. “There was always a nagging doubt whether the story we were following would have the kind of pay-off that would make a good film.”

Thanks to how things turned out, the film has a dramatic narrative arc — with the triumph of AAP after having been dismissed by the BJP and Congress, including a comically overconfident cameo from Sheila Dikshit. Access proved easy, given how minor the AAP was considered in 2012. And the makers eschewed direct interviews and a voice-over, allowing the narrative to speak for itself through candid footage and news clips.

They felt there was more power in showing than telling. “At some level I don’t think people want to hear any more interviews,” said Shukla.

“People want to see them do things. So in our film the camera is really close to these characters and you feel a certain intimacy of being in the room.”

It’s been about four years since the project began, helped with money from grants and a crowdfunding effort. Though concerns of datedness did arise, the film is a well-told and entertaining account. “The reason we finished shooting at the point we did was that we felt we had a story which started at one point and ended at another,” said Ranka. “We felt what we captured had a certain resilience (against) the future.”

Bhavya Dore is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist

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