KIFF Special: ‘1971 Liberation War wasn’t just forgotten, it was erased by design’

Emmy-nominated filmmaker Ramesh Sharma, who is revisiting the Bangladesh Liberation War through his latest documentary ‘The Chronicles of the Forgotten Genocide: The Kissinger Doctrine’, mentions that revisiting the 1971 war wasn’t a choice but a reckoning for him. The director believes that too many voices have been buried beneath the cold architecture of geopolitics in the 1971 war. The National award-winning director, who is known for powerful documentaries like ‘The Journalist and The Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl’ and ‘Ahimsa - Gandhi: The Power of the Powerless’, is in Kolkata for the ‘Special Screening’ of his new documentary at the 31st Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF). After a screening at Radha Studio, the documentary was screened at Sisir Mancha on Wednesday. Debojyoti Mishra, who composed the music of ‘The Chronicles of the Forgotten Genocide: The Kissinger Doctrine’ was also present at the screening. ‘Millennium Post’ chats with the filmmaker on past atrocities to present crises and more:

What inspired you to revisit the Bangladesh Liberation War and how did technology, especially AI, help reconstruct lost or erased historical footage?

The Bangladesh Liberation War has always been a wound not just of a nation, but of humanity’s conscience. For me, revisiting it wasn’t a choice; it was a reckoning. Too much had been silenced. Too many voices were buried beneath the cold architecture of geopolitics. The genocide of 1971 - three million dead, 10 million displaced - wasn’t just forgotten; it was erased by design. That silence demanded confrontation.

When I began retracing the steps of history, I found fragments - declassified US cables, half-burnt reels in government archives and fading testimonies whispered in the refugee camps of India. Each fragment spoke of complicity: the White House tapes of Nixon and Kissinger mocking ‘the bleeding Bengalis’, the ‘Blood Telegram’ warning Washington of a genocide, ignored. It wasn’t enough to document; I had to resurrect. Generative AI became our invisible archivist - re-animating still photos, enhancing audio from broken reels and stitching scattered intelligence reports into a living timeline of betrayal and courage. It allowed memory to breathe again.

The result isn’t merely a documentary; it’s an act of resistance - against amnesia, against imperial narratives and against the quiet comfort of forgetting. Technology didn’t rewrite history. It revealed it - pixel by pixel, truth by truth.

Your film implicates Nixon and Kissinger as ‘poster boys of genocide’. What kind of reactions have you got from international audiences? When will it be released in the USA?

The film hasn’t been released in the USA. The first screening is in the Asian World Film Festival 2025 and will be shown on November 14 at the Culver Theatre, Culver City, LA. But there have been books like Christopher Hitchens’ ‘The Trials of Henry Kissinger’, which accused him of being a war criminal. That balance was the tightrope - between truth and trauma, witness and wound. Every frame carries a moral weight. The Bangladesh Liberation War is not history on paper; it is grief engraved in living memory.

How did you balance the emotional intensity of survivor testimonies and violent imagery while ensuring historical accuracy and audience sensitivity?

Survivors didn’t just recount - they relived. Their eyes became our archive. But the challenge was to ensure their pain didn’t turn into spectacle. The goal was empathy, not voyeurism. Violent imagery was used sparingly, never as shock, always as evidence. The power of absence - an empty field, a bloodstained sari swaying in the wind - often spoke more than graphic footage ever could. To maintain accuracy, every emotional beat was anchored in verifiable truth: declassified US State Department cables, the ‘Blood Telegram’, Anthony Mascarenhas’s reports and testimonies recorded by international observers like Julian Francis.

Past Meets Present

The film ends with the song ‘America is above the laws’. What message did you want to convey by connecting the events of 1971 to the current global refugee crisis?

That final song, ‘America is above the laws’, is not an anthem. It’s an indictment - a lament in the language of irony. By the time those words rise over the closing images - the refugee columns from 1971 dissolving into regime changes in Chile, the murder of Allende, the genocide in Cambodia and today the genocide in Gaza - the audience realises this isn’t history repeating. It’s history refusing to end.

The message was clear: the architecture of power that enabled the Bangladesh genocide still stands - polished, justified, institutionalised. The same vocabulary of ‘strategic interests’, ‘regional stability’ and ‘collateral damage’ continues to sanctify the suffering of millions.

The song, stripped down to its raw chords and accusatory refrain, bridges those decades. It confronts the audience with an uncomfortable continuity: how the rhetoric of democracy often conceals the machinery of dominance. How the superpower that once ignored genocide now builds walls against the refugees of wars it helped ignite. The film asks, quietly but firmly: ‘When does the lesson begin?’ That ending isn’t about America alone. It’s about the world’s moral paralysis. 1971 was not a footnote - it was a prophecy. And we are still living inside its echo.

How do you view Bangladesh’s current relationship with the US, given the history your film revisits?

My view is that Bangladesh-US relations today reflect what I would call pragmatic amnesia. On one level, Washington and Dhaka proceed as if the 1971 genocide, the foreign policy missteps around it (with actors like Henry Kissinger and the CIA) and the full moral account of that era are buried beneath progress, trade and shifting alliances. On another level, Bangladesh has gone through a regime change and there is enough evidence to show the role of the USA and the CIA in this new regime change. And the shadow of the CIA still looks large and ominous today.