The Fisherman and the Banker is a modern-day David and Goliath tale, chronicling a fishing community in India’s Gulf of Kutch as they take on the World Bank’s private lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), for funding a coal-fired power plant that threatens their way of life.
Filmed over a decade, the documentary captures the fishermen’s fight against industrial encroachment and their alliance with US lawyers to file a groundbreaking lawsuit, which reaches the US Supreme Court in 2018. With a poetic and observational lens, the film explores their legal battle and profound bond with the environment, posing a powerful question: can the resilience of a community rewrite the rules of global power—or will the might of corporations and institutions crush their fight for justice?