Critics Campus 2025 participant Parth Rahatekar speaks to Vivek Chaudhary about activism, government corruption and caste as experienced by the disadvantaged Indian farming community documented in his film I, Poppy.

The flower is soft, like silk. In its bulb is a fabled power. The opium poppy’s mythical quality is hard to deny – the world has fought wars in its name, while tales from opium dens are still whispered across nations. And in India, one of three countries today that grow the plant legally for medicinal use, the poppy is immortalised in many Mughal Empire tapestries. It remains ubiquitous, however, in western Rajasthan, the region I, Poppy director Vivek Chaudhary is from. “I had seen a lot of opium usage on the daily,” he reflects. “The adults drank this juice, while we drank tea. It looked like tea, but it wasn’t. Why were they having more fun?”

Vardibai and Mangilal, the mother–son duo at the centre of Chaudhary’s sobering documentary, demystify the poppy by taking you to their home and field, and to protests on the outskirts of Chittorgarh. Vardibai has been farming poppies for the last 50 years; she holds her farm close, and her concern for her son closer. Mangilal is a schoolteacher by vocation but an activist by compulsion, with a voice that rings with restlessness. In the film, we see him teaching kids about equality through the lens of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, the architect of India’s Constitution and an anti-caste reformer, then rushing off to rally farmers to demand fair rates for their produce. That evening, Vardibai chides him, worried that he’s “drowning” their family because of his activism.

“When we first started shooting, there was this desire to talk about corruption, the mafia, all of those things,” Chaudhary says. “But after we met Mangilal, we realised the story was here. We wanted to talk about India through a family almost – let their lived experience comment on the state of the country and this world.”

Alongside the mother and son’s frayed dynamic, I, Poppy shows the agricultural community’s growing tension, especially when on the cusp of harvest season. Every year, authorities hand out licences allowing farmers to sell their produce to the government; owing to concerns around narcotic misuse, it is prohibited to sell to anyone but the state. Having no licence means no income, leaving months of hard work in brutal temperatures to waste. Should the farmers decide to sell illegally, they face incarceration. “You’re in jail for very long,” Vardibai explains in the film. “If your dear ones die, then also you can’t come home.” While the licences serve a purpose, they can be weaponised as one among many examples of India’s widely documented police brutality and corruption. Many farmers are forced to pay bribes amounting to lakhs of rupees every year to sell what they sow. And, according to Mangilal, the price at which the government buys poppies from farmers hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since 1998.

Mangilal’s discontent is apparent from the first frame: we find him at his home, his family trying to sleep around him, while he talks obsessively into his phone about the troubled relationships between farmers and officials. Shot largely inside Mangilal’s residence and on Vardibai’s farm, I, Poppy gives viewers an expansive understanding of the farmers’ situation – not as a call to action, but to foster compassion. The camera is static when we’re in Vardibai’s field, but moves frantically when following Mangilal.

Yet the documentary was not originally planned to feature Mangilal and Vardibai at all; at the end of the first farming season that Chaudhary and cinematographer Mustaqeem Khan observed, they realised the upper-caste farmers they’d chosen to shoot saw them as unwelcome investigators. “It became clear that the presence of the camera deterred the farming families we were first talking to from being vulnerable,” Chaudhary shares. These farmers, he explains, were indulging in the rampant corruption that exploited their lower-caste counterparts. When the filmmaking team tried to shoot what the filmmaker describes as a “clandestine wrongdoing”, they were mobbed by around 50 to 60 farmers, and their memory card was destroyed. “Our dream felt like it came crashing down. We were ready to give up, but then this man we met at a protest earlier called me to his house.” It was Mangilal. Chaudhary recalls initially being reluctant to go to Mangilal’s house:

We saw Mangilal first in March 2018 at the protests, and June was when we got mobbed. We didn’t really believe him at first because he sounded phoney. Nobody talks like that or puts themselves that out there. We were trying not to capture him, but he found a way to make it into every frame. He’s very verbose, and didn’t really fit the mould of a farmer in our heads. But when we went home with him, his mother was not deterred by our presence. She just had a problem with him for coming home late and doing activism all day.

Over the four years that I, Poppy follows Mangilal, he’s seen calling out corrupt officials without fear, presiding over protest meetings, planning trips to Delhi to take on legislative constituency members and leading marches. “He likes to be in the middle of things because it’s coming from the experience of being oppressed,” recounts Chaudhary. “No-one can pretend for four years, you know.” As someone living in an India where untouchability is a reality, Vardibai also has her reasons to speak. One quiet night, she tells her son, “Don’t forget who we are: Meghwal [lower-caste]. They don’t say it to our face, but behind our backs, they say, ‘This shit-picker, trying to change the world.’”

“There is this fatigue, I guess, and the idea that it is nonsense to even think about changing anything is getting stronger in the world,” Chaudhary says. “But, here, you see this guy who has so much to lose, putting it all on the line, [protesting] still.”

I, Poppy is the second farming documentary from India to win Best International Feature at Hot Docs, after Nishtha Jain’s Farming the Revolution, which traced one of the largest farmers’ protests in the world. When asked what he has to say to filmmakers considering the medium, Chaudhary replies, “Documentaries can be extractive in any case. It’s important to not have that top-down approach. And to root yourself [in] where you’re from. That’s where the stories are.”

Mangilal still protests, and the filmmakers are hoping to start a fundraiser to help the family travel with the film and pay off their debts. I, Poppy reminds viewers that, for its cultivators, the opium poppy is far from what the Sumerians called hul gil – this ‘joy plant’ blooms in toil.

I, Poppy screens on Monday 11 and Saturday 23 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.