Set in the poppy-growing regions of rural Rajasthan, Vivek Chaudhary’s 2025 documentary I, Poppy offers a quietly rigorous portrait of agrarian labor, caste and bureaucratic control. Centered on a Dalit farming family navigating a restrictive and exploitative licensing system, the film observes how these forces shape everyday life across generations. Rather than staging protests as a spectacle or resolution, Chaudhary builds I, Poppy around an unresolved tension between endurance and dissent. In doing so, the film shows how systemic injustice emerges gradually through routine, repetition and the costs borne by those on the lower rungs of power within one of the world’s largest democracies.

I, Poppy premiered at Hot Docs 2025, where it won Best International Feature Documentary and went on to receive the 2026 Critics’ Choice Award India for Best Documentary. In this interview, Chaudhary reflects on the making of the film by tracing its evolution through uncertainty, constraint and a sustained engagement with the political and the personal.

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Dipankar Sarkar: How did you come across Mangilal and his fight for farmers’ rights, and what led you to place him at the center of I, Poppy?

Vivek Chaudhary: The film’s focus on Mangilal emerged somewhat serendipitously. When I began researching in 2017, I, Poppy was conceived as a much larger project tracing the entire opium value chain from farmers, middlemen, mafia networks, law enforcement, addicts and to those dependent on the medicine. During this phase, I met several farming families, all from upper-caste villages, accessed through existing social networks. We spent nearly an entire season filming, around 60 to 70 days, but each family eventually withdrew. Faced with corruption, pressure from authorities and fear of reprisals, they became increasingly hesitant. As they put it plainly: for us it was a film, and for them it was life.

Although frustrating, that first season helped us understand the ecosystem we were entering. Midway through, we heard of a protest outside the Chittorgarh collectorate. There, we noticed Mangilal. Initially, he didn’t fit our preconceived image of a Rajasthani farmer and initially left little impression on us. We moved on.

By June 2018, after a bruising season, we were filming a moment that clearly revealed corruption when a group of farmers attacked our crew, tried to damage our equipment and destroyed our memory cards. That evening, Mangilal heard about the incident and called to warn us not to stay at our hotel. He invited us to his home for safety. At his house, we encountered a family unguarded in our presence, unafraid of the camera. Over time, we realized something crucial. Within this single household existed the full moral and emotional spectrum we had been grappling with for a year. Creatively and practically, this offered a solution. By situating the film within one family, we could speak to larger systemic issues while reducing risk. We went on to film with Mangilal and his family across four seasons.

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DS: What kind of preparation did you undertake before you began shooting, particularly in terms of taking the characters into confidence and building trust?

VC: Trust-building was both the most crucial and the most difficult part of working in this world. No one — farmers, police, narcotics officials or the mafia — wants an outsider to look inside the system. That opacity is precisely what allows it to function like a private kingdom. In the first season, despite investing months of time, many farmers withdrew. Their reluctance was entirely justified. We would leave, but they had to continue living within the system.

The difficulty was compounded by a larger reality [of] how bureaucratic and political structures reduce people to subjects rather than citizens, leaving them feeling unable to speak. After six months of shooting, the process was so exhausting that we nearly abandoned the film altogether.

Things changed when we entered Mangilal’s household. From the first night, we were clear about our intentions and asked for consent, even in the moment if something mattered to us as filmmakers. Could we film it? Their willingness set the tone. The following day, we explained what we hoped to explore, even though the film itself was still undefined, and asked if they would allow us to work with them.

What sustained trust over time was transparency. We showed them everything we made from trailers, 10-minute sequences [and] the rough cuts, so they always knew how they were being represented. They retained the right to refuse a scene or stop filming altogether. While we acknowledged the power imbalance inherent in having the camera and resources, we tried to work collaboratively, keeping the channel of consent open throughout.

Beyond the process, the relationship became deeply human. Mangilal once joked that we were both fighting a system in our own ways — him through activism, me through a film that might never “win.” His mother, too, valued being listened to and documented, often without a camera present. These relationships developed organically, shaped by shared rural backgrounds within our team, and ultimately made the film possible.

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DS: The poppy itself functions as a dense metaphor — robust yet fragile, regulated and exploited, used for both medicinal and intoxicating purposes. At what point did the title I, Poppy crystalize for you?

VC: We initially wanted poppy itself to function as a character in the film. Even as the project gradually narrowed — from a broad system to farmers, and eventually to a single family — that idea remained intact. Within this household, the mother and son have distinct, even opposing, relationships with the crop, which allowed the plant’s symbolic presence to persist.

The title I, Poppy reflects this duality. It is both “I and poppy” and “I, as poppy, speaking.” Though we considered changing the title as the film evolved, we kept returning to it. It had a resonance, and the project had already come to be known by that name. The Hindi title, Hu Amal, carries an additional layer of meaning. Amal also means “to implement,” which further reinforced our decision. In the end, the title felt right on multiple levels, and we chose to keep it.

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DS: The unresolved tension between Mangilal and his mother, Vardibai, gives I, Poppy its emotional spine. How did you approach documenting a conflict that is at once ethical, emotional and generational?

VC: As we continued filming and then revisiting the footage during off-seasons, the contours of this relationship became clearer. Mangilal functions as the protagonist in a conventional narrative sense. He moves the action, engages with institutions, makes phone calls, attends protests and confronts authority. Yet for much of the film, he remains an outward-facing figure, almost armored. His vulnerability surfaces only much later.

Vardibai, by contrast, is emotionally open from the start. She reflects constantly on what is happening to her family, her land and her labor. While she may appear passive within the larger narrative of activism and confrontation, she is in fact deeply active through her long relationship with the land, poppy cultivation and sustaining the household. Over time, we realized that the viewer’s emotional allegiance gravitates towards her. You empathize with Mangilal, but you stay with her.

This distinction shaped our approach. Gradually, we understood that if we could render this mother–son relationship with honesty, it would give the film its emotional and narrative core. From that intimacy, the film could then open out onto larger questions of intergenerational conflict, the burden of activism, the fear families carry when loved ones confront power and the moral ambiguity of survival within corrupt systems. These are tensions we ourselves relate to as people who want to resist injustice but also need to earn a living and protect our families.

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DS: Moreover, Mangilal’s activism places strain not only on institutions but also on his own household, particularly his children. How important was it for you to show the domestic costs of political resistance?

VC: I think narratives in popular cinema are often made too neat. [I, Poppy] is structured as a simple battle of an individual against the system. But lived reality is rarely that clean. There is always a price exacted when someone is driven by a cause, whether that drive comes from moral conviction, ego or a desire to “shake the world.” In Mangilal’s case, all of these impulses coexist.

As we were filming, we realized that although we had set out to make a protest film, we were spending just as much time inside the household. What began to reveal itself was the drudgery of activism, the exhaustion of organizing, the relentlessness of phone calls, meetings and negotiations that often felt futile or Sisyphean. To ignore it would have meant failing as filmmakers, and refusing to let reality guide form and focus. Importantly, showing this fatigue does not diminish the struggle or make it less heroic. If anything, it deepens it. Ordinary life is slow, repetitive and often boring, yet people still get up each day and continue. It was this quiet persistence, observed over time, that felt most truthful and most necessary to acknowledge in the film.

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DS: I, Poppy resists the kind of narrative closure often expected from documentaries on agrarian distress. What led you to embrace an unresolved ending rather than a moment of reckoning or victory?

VC: Films can often become sites of wish fulfillment, where we project what we want to see, rather than what exists in the world. That can be valuable at times. After screenings, some viewers have described the film as bleak or hopeless. But I don’t see the film that way at all. The world itself is bleak, and the film is not making it so. Within that bleakness, what I see are people full of life — laughing, loving, resisting and challenging the system in whatever ways they can. For me, that is profoundly hopeful. I would much rather spend time with people like this than accept the idea that the world is unchangeable. That refusal to give up is already a form of optimism.

The second reason we resisted a neat ending is something we became more certain of during the editing process and through audience reactions. When a film ties everything up cleanly, viewers often leave with the feeling that the problem has been resolved, and that nothing more needs to be done. But with I, Poppy, audiences leave unsettled. They ask, “What can we do?” That discomfort is important. There are no easy answers in politics, in social structures or in lived reality. So why should documentaries pretend otherwise?

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DS: Through this documentary, do you see corruption as a flaw in the system, or as something rooted in social hierarchies that decide whose labor, voices or complaints are taken seriously?

VC: I think corruption is a feature, not a flaw. Human beings create structures, inhabit them and bring their own biases, desires for control and ideas about who gets to speak and who must remain invisible. This becomes especially evident in a household like Mangilal’s. On our first visit, his mother asked if we wanted water, and we said yes. It was an ordinary gesture yet loaded with social meaning. Later, during dinner, she seemed uneasy, pacing and struggling to speak. Mangilal reassured her and eventually invited us to eat with them. In that moment, the dynamics of gratitude, hospitality and social hierarchy were laid bare.

In places like Rajasthan, deeply shaped by caste, these social structures are inseparable from everyday life. They are embedded in routines, gestures and interactions. Corruption, bias and hierarchy are not anomalies. They are features of the system because people are the ones who build and sustain it.

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DS: The documentary was shaped by the editorial collaboration between Camille Mouton and Tanushree Das. How did their distinct sensibilities influence the film’s structure?

VC: In hindsight, I can take some credit for wanting the film to move between an insider’s and an outsider’s point of view, and I’m glad it unfolded over time. Resources ran out at various points and we had to regroup repeatedly, but I love how the film ultimately came together.

Tanushree Das brought a deep understanding of India and the subtle ways oppression manifests. Her perspective was informed by her own father, an activist whose idealism often caused family tensions. This empathy allowed her to intuitively grasp both Mangilal and his mother, giving the film its emotional spine.

Later, when we collaborated with a French co-producer, a new editor, Camille,  joined. Her sensitive, international perspective helped us step back from over-explaining context about opium, caste or narcotics, and focus on the human conflict at the heart of the film: the mother-son relationship. With her input, the film expanded from 63 minutes to 82 minutes, allowing us to inhabit this world more fully. The result is a work that resonates both as an Indian film and on an international level.

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DS: I, Poppy has been widely recognized at international festivals. How do you feel about a story so rooted in a specific regional and caste context traveling globally?

VC: It almost feels like a vindication of the idea that a much larger story can be told through a single relationship between a mother and son, rather than making the narrative solely about them. My cameraman, Mustaqeem Khan, and I wanted to immerse viewers in the world and let them breathe it, making it topical and distinctly Indian yet resonant beyond that context.

The film speaks to a time when activism is increasingly difficult, governments are cracking down on dissent and the avenues to resist are narrowing. But the desire to fight persists, always at a cost. Through this family, we could explore not just their lives but ours, and extend that perspective to a universal audience.

Working with an international co-producer and editor helped amplify this reach. Festival selections further confirmed that the film transcends its Indian setting. Audiences across the world connected in different ways. Some responded to the activist thread, others to the family dynamic. Yet the story resonated universally.

So, It’s been an enriching journey to see a local story spark dialogue and empathy across the world.

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DS: I, Poppy was made with support from the IDFA Bertha Fund, the Hong Kong — Asia Film Financing Forum and others. In the absence of similar support in India, how important are these international funds and platforms for documentary filmmakers?

VC: For me, these avenues of support are as important as breathing. Without them, I don’t think I could sustain the time, energy and effort needed to make films, or receive the occasional validation that keeps you going.

It’s disheartening that we often have to seek financing from the West, because, ideally, every country should value art enough to create its own spaces, especially for work that questions systems. In India, with censorship and systemic obstacles, such support is deeply necessary. Yet even globally, I’ve realized over the past year that the space for independent, critical cinema is shrinking, particularly under authoritarian regimes that actively repress art to limit critical consciousness.

Thankfully, these islands of funding, sponsorship and international collaboration exist. They allow filmmakers to meet, exchange ideas and learn from each other. Without them, many of us would be forced to abandon independent filmmaking altogether.

Dipankar Sarkar (@Dipankar_Tezpur) is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic based in India. As a freelancer, he regularly contributes to various Indian publications on cinema-related topics.

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