Sameer

Engineering student Sameer is picked up by the police from his hostel following a deadly bombing incident. He turns out to be innocent, but the cops blackmail him into infiltrating a terrorist ring headed by his college roommate Yasin. After all, Sameer has a Muslim name, which both gives him access to Yasin’s social circle and renders him expendable in the police’s eyes. But the plan goes awry when Sameer descends deeper into this twisted game. Set in Ahmedabad in the Western Indian state of Gujarat, Dakxinkumar Bajrange’s Sameer unfolds 10 years after the intercommunal riots of 2002, which resulted in the deaths of over a thousand civilians, predominantly Muslims. The violence left people broken, and the atmosphere was so tense that a child’s mischief was enough to set two marginalised communities living in the same slum against each other. The job of restoring sanity falls on the shoulders of Manto, a local theatre artist standing in for Bajrange, a playwright-activist himself. A topical political thriller with admirable performances, Sameer is rife with dramatic twists and turns that cohere into a damning picture of the state of the nation. Slippery in plot and politics though it might appear, this is a film that does not mince its words. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)