Nasir (2020) - Arun Karthick

​Featuring one of the most emotionally searing final shots I've seen in a film this year, Arun Karthick's Nasir is a beautifully constructed experience.  The day-to-day life of a humble, loving street merchant is profiled with intimacy, juxtaposed against the destructive calcification of the collective angst deployed by the majority on the minority populace.  An astute character study that builds towards its truly devastating conclusion, Arun Karthick's assured direction conveys a sense of danger yet notions of cultural unease largely exist in the periphery to our central protagonist.  Karthick's visual acumen elicits a sense of great intimacy and specificity, with the 4:3 aspect ratio enunciating the lived-in, day-to-day life of its central protagonist.  The use of spatiality employed here draws a fascinating dichotomy between home, a place of pain but also a sanctuary - the fishbowl visual motif is stunning, and that of the outside world in which strife, and unrest loom, conflict feeling like an inevitability.  In the film's finale, the abruptness of violence is deeply startling but certainly earned.  A layered character study of subtle unease that leads to an explosion of ferocity, Arun Karthick's Nasir is a beautifully rendered study of the Muslim minority in India - a deeply effective tragedy that would make a great double-bill with Saeed Akhtar Mirza's masterwork Salim Langede Pe Mat Ro.