Disciples Review: Childhood in the Language of Certainty

When the parents leave Vidya Mutth, some of the boys cry. Admission to this revered Hindu school in Varanasi has required travel, an examination, and anxious waiting; now the adults can take their pride home while the children must stay. During the entrance test, the handheld camera moves through the bustle surrounding Guru Avimuktesh, who oversees selection himself. Acceptance feels momentous before we know much about the education being offered. Pankaj Johar and Sunaina Kapoor’s documentary Disciples lets the departure register as a child might experience it: a family achievement whose immediate cost is the family’s absence.

For twelve-year-old Satyarth, the place also holds a wonder that homesickness cannot explain away. He speaks with amazement about seeing the holy Ganges every day. His seriousness gives the river a presence in his imagined life, something he has wanted and can scarcely believe is now available to him. The filmmakers make room for this attachment. It matters that the school can answer a sincere longing, that a boy can arrive with desires of his own. His reverence gives the institution somewhere intimate to establish itself.

Around Satyarth and fellow newcomer Hari, school life refuses to settle into the solemnity its guardians might prefer. Boys chatter, quarrel, play, labor over Sanskrit, and surrender to sleep. Their bodies keep interrupting the business of instruction. Johar and Kapoor allow these interruptions enough space to make the classroom feel inhabited, its pupils capable of boredom and pleasure beyond whatever argument their presence might serve. There is relief in their mischief. Yet a child’s refusal to sit quietly offers little assurance about the ideas he will accept; restlessness and obedience can occupy the same small body.

Avimuktesh supplies those ideas with a composure that makes the surrounding bustle feel especially vulnerable. He advocates Hindu rule, tells Muslims to convert or leave for Pakistan, and speaks against religious freedom and the mixing of castes. The calm delivery gives exclusion the temperature of ordinary instruction. He can speak about people’s right to remain in their country with the assurance of a teacher correcting an exercise. Since the film presents his rhetoric from its opening, its unease develops through recognition: we know what is being said, then spend time among the children who are learning how to hear it.

Sanskrit memorization becomes an unsettling companion to this education. Repetition has a legitimate place in acquiring a language, preserving words until the student can use them independently; alongside it, the guru’s political and religious claims are also available to be learned and repeated. The distinction lies in what those claims ask the boys to accept about other human beings. Hari’s eventual reproduction of the guru’s intolerance gives that process a painfully recognizable face. The gentle newcomer has acquired an assured way of speaking about exclusion. A voice can sound settled while the person speaking is still being formed.

I cannot know how deeply Hari believes each inherited proposition, and the film’s access cannot settle that uncertainty. His conviction is audible; its permanence remains beyond the image. Keeping that limit in view makes his change harder to dismiss, because approval, imitation, and belief need no clean separation to influence a child’s conduct. The boys’ occasional playfulness toward the camera complicates the observational intimacy in a related way. They know someone is watching. Their behavior includes the pleasure of being seen, leaving us to attend to children who are already adjusting themselves to several adult audiences.

The editing becomes more accusatory when the guru’s elaborate birthday celebrations are intercut with the pupils’ shabby living quarters. Here the film gives a material shape to the distance between institutional prestige and everyday care. Ceremony gathers around the leader while the children’s accommodation appears scarcely worthy of the honor attached to entering it. The juxtaposition cannot account for every resource or decision within the school, but it makes its visible priorities difficult to ignore. Those parents who waited through the examination have entrusted living, homesick children to this place. The cut brings that responsibility into the celebration.

Elsewhere, the filmmakers’ restraint leaves some institutional distinctions unnecessarily obscure. Variations in shaved heads and robe colors are visible without enough explanation of their significance. For a viewer unfamiliar with these practices, the absence narrows the ability to read the social world the camera has entered. Some understanding of ritual or status remains unavailable, even as the guru’s sectarian message is unmistakable. Observation gives us access to daily proximity; it cannot automatically supply the knowledge that would make every difference within that daily life intelligible. A little clarification could have deepened our attention to the boys without interrupting it.

That attention is tested again when the pupils perform drills resembling children playing soldiers. Their slight bodies make the activity look provisional, something tried on together, while the speeches we have heard give their movements a threatening possible meaning.

The camera records the drill and leaves its inward significance uncertain. Perhaps a boy is enjoying the company, seeking praise, or practicing an identity he already accepts. These possibilities can coexist. To watch the boys only as future extremists would surrender their unfinished lives to another adult certainty. Yet their play now includes gestures whose meaning they may have learned before they could question it.

Disciples had its world premiere at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival on June 12, 2026, followed by theatrical screenings including at London’s Bertha DocHouse. Co-directed by Pankaj Johar and Sunaina Kapoor, the striking Indian-German observational documentary set in the holy city of Varanasi follows two young boys enrolled at a traditional Hindu gurukul, chronicling how dogmatic religious teachings and political indoctrination shape their impressionable minds in contrasting ways.

Full Credits

• Title: Disciples

• Distributor: Penny Wise Films, UpNorth Film, Ventana Film

• Release date: June 12, 2026 (Sheffield DocFest)

• Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes (81 minutes)

• Director: Pankaj Johar, Sunaina Kapoor

• Writers: Pankaj Johar

• Producers and Executive Producers: Pankaj Johar, Sunaina Kapoor, Hans Robert Eisenhauer, Mette Hoffmann Meyer, Christian Aune Falch

• Cast: Guru Avimukteshwaranand Saraswati, Hari Mohan Das, Abhishek Sharma, Satyarth Sharma, Preeti Basra

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Alejandro Valdés Rochín, Pankaj Johar

• Editors: Jørgen Meyer, Audun Røstad

• Composer: Manohar Naik