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Movie Name: The Kerala Story
Directed by: Sudipto Sen, Vipul Amrutlal Shah
Starring: Adah Sharma, Yogita Bihani, Sonia Balani, Siddhi Idnani
Genre: Drama
Release Date: 05 May, 2023
Running Time: 138 Minutes
Language: Hindi
Rating:
A converted muslim women Fatima Ba narrates her ordeal of how she once wanted to become a nurse but was abducted from her home and manipulated by religious vanguards and turned into an ISIS terrorist and landed in Afghanistan jail.
The Kerala Story: About
The Kerala Story is an upcoming Indian Hindi-language film directed by Sudipto Sen, produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah. The plot follows the story of a group of women from Kerala who are converted to Islam and join the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The film has courted controversy for portraying itself as a real story and for making false claims that thousands of women from Kerala are being converted to Islam and recruited into ISIS. The film also faces opposition from political parties in Kerala who allege it’s promoting the Sangh Parivar’s agenda.
The film stars Adah Sharma, Yogita Bihani, Sonia Balani, and Siddhi Idnani. It is scheduled to be released on 5 May 2023.
Premise and factual accuracy:
The film is captioned as being based on a real-life incident, while the reliability of the statistics shown are not backed by any real evidence. It makes a reference to Love Jihad propaganda in Kerala, where Muslim youth allegedly lure Hindu girls to convert them to Islam.
The teaser, released on 3 November 2022, featured Adah Sharma playing the character of Fathima Ba — a Hindu Malayali nurse — who had converted to Islam and joined the ISIS, before ending up in an Afghan jail. She identifies to be one of the 32,000 girls, from the Hindu and Christian communities, who are missing from Kerala and have been recruited to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) after being converted to Islam. The claimed figures are widely inaccurate, being based on mistranslations, misquotes and extrapolations from misrepresentations of unrelated statistics.
The Observer Research Foundation in a 2019 report notes that about 60 to 70 individuals had joined ISIS from Kerala between 2014 and 2018. According to Indian government figures not more than a total of 100 – 200 Indians had joined the organization over the years, one of the smallest figures of any country with a substantial Muslim population. The US Department of State in its 2020 report on terrorism had documented that there were a total of 66 individuals from India who were affiliated with ISIS at that time.
The events portrayed in the film seem to be inspired by four women from Kerala who converted to Islam and traveled with their husbands to Afghanistan to join ISIS between 2016 and 2018. They were part of a 21-member group from Kerala to join ISIS in 2016, remain incarcerated in Afghanistan since surrendering in 2019.
The Kerala Story: Review
The Kerala Story opened in theatres on Friday, May 5, but the film has been making headlines ever since the release of its trailer. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has called the film a ‘product of the Sangh Parivar’s lie factory,’ while Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the film shows the ugly truth of terrorism. In the journey to its release, The Kerala Story has seen numerous petitions in several courts seeking to stall its screening. But having braved all, how has the film really fared? Let’s find out.
The Kerala Story revolves around the life of Shalini Unnikrishnan (Adah Sharma), a young woman from Kerala from a middle class family. Like many middle class women in Kerala, Shalini enrols herself in a nursing course in Kasaragod. There, she finds friends in her roommates Asifa (Sonia Balani), Geetanjali (Siddhi Idnani), and Nimah (Yogita Bihani).
Things start off happy for Shalini before Asifa entraps her and her three friends into a web of manipulation. Pit against all the travails of being a woman in semi-urban Kerala, Shalini and Geetanjali find a ready solution to their problems – offered by Asifa – located in conversion, and eventually subscription to the cause of the Islamic State, a terror group.
The narrative hits hard for its focus on a subject that has often been kept at bay for its incendiary potential. Director Sudipto Sen, who had earlier made a documentary on the same subject titled In The Name of Love, is now armed with fictional devices that enable him to explore the human temperament at its vulnerable core. The film doesn’t seek to lecture, but simply puts events in their socio-political context(s).
The film begins with a note that states: Inspired by several real-life incidents, and therefore sheds the weight of sticking true to documentary truth in an attempt to explore something truer. The audience is introduced to Adah’s character while she is facing incarceration, and then cuts to her home in Kerala where Shalini, in a very relatable manner, is attempting to assuage her mother and grandmother’s reluctance at letting her leave home to pursue a career in nursing.
The makers of the film adopt a show-don’t-tell approach to articulate how the three young women are brainwashed into giving up their faiths. The sequences move at a pace that is realistic and consequently chilling. In one of the scenes that attempt to shock, a character spits on her father while he is ailing at a hospital.
The Kerala Story features two scenes that show sexual harassment, but to Sudipto Sen’s credit, the scenes are so sensitively shot that they stand against sensationalism. The same applies to a graphic sequence in which a character is killed in public view. The violence is realistic, not gratuitous.
Coming to performances, Adah Sharma is the heart and soul of The Kerala Story. The actress, best known to Hindi audiences for her work in 1920 and Hasee Toh Phasee, sinks her teeth into a challenging character. Her eyes speak a thousand words and her accented Hindi is both convincing and consistent, disallowing any potential of her character turning into a caricature. The dialogues in Malayalam lend the film an additional flavour of authenticity. Siddhi Idnani and Yogita Bihani too shine in their respective roles.
That said, The Kerala Story has its share of shortcomings. The pace of the narrative seems to flag at certain points in the second half. The focussed attention on Adah Sharma’s character do not allow the characters played by Siddhi Idnani and Yogita Bihani to live up to their true potential. The background music, haunting, and layering an already intense narrative, in effect ends up diluting the realism of the storyline.
To sum up, The Kerala Story – contrary to perception in the media, social, mainstream or otherwise – isn’t really about a region or a religion. For all intents and purposes, it is a raw and hard-hitting tale that explores how youthful naivety can fall prey to forces beyond their scope of imagination.
