Black Friday

Black Friday is the film that polevaulted Anurag Kashyap into the limelight. This is a gripping drama focusing on police investigations into the series of bomb blasts that rocked Mumbai in 1993, killing 257 people; Muslim terrorists were behind the bombings. The film is more urgently relevant than ever, not only because the bombings continued in Mumbai in 2003, 2006 and 2008 – and elsewhere – but because we ignore their festering causes at our own risk. The New York Times called it "a work of angry humanism.” Kashyap’s screenplay, based on the book by S. Hussain Zaidi, is remarkable for being a film on the underworld that does not glorify violence, but instead explores the bombers’ alienation. He shows how communal hatred between India’s Hindu majority and the Muslim minority manifested itself in institutionalised discrimination and the Mumbai riots of 1992/93, in which over 1,500 died, the majority Muslims, leading to the retaliatory bombings. He dares to name living people – almost unheard of in an Indian feature – police commissioner Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay Menon) who investigated the case, and Tiger Memon (Pavan Malhotra) who had the blasts executed on the instruction of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim (Vijay Maurya). The cinematography has the immediacy of a documentary. The ensemble cast put in superb performances, especially Kay Kay Menon. Indian Ocean’s music provides a haunting contrapuntal voice to the carnage.