The Fisherman and the Banker: film charts Indian fishers’ fight with a giant

Filmed over a decade, the documentary follows fishers in India’s Gulf of Kutch, who blamed the construction of a power plant in Gujarat for depleting fish populations. Photograph: Handout

Early on in The Fisherman and the Banker, Ibrahim Saliman Manjalia, a charismatic fisher originally from Badreshwar, tells those gathered around him: “We are not formally educated. We don’t have formal qualifications. Our qualifications are that we can read the water and understand what it’s telling us.”

The story of a group of Gujarati fishers from India’s Gulf of Kutch who sued the private investment arm of the World Bank – the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – began in 2015 and garnered international attention before reaching the US supreme court, finally losing on appeal in 2022.