Which Colour?

Indian films centred on markedly Muslim characters are rare, and those that don't employ these characters primarily as objects of violence and social injustice are rarer. In Which Colour?, a tender, trailblazing new work from Shahrukhkhan Chavada, Muslim bodies exist in an existential autonomy, untouched by dramatic aggression and capable of accessing a whole range of human experience.

Which Colour? depicts the quotidian life of an extended working-class family in a Muslim quarter in the heart of of Ahmedabad on what turns out to be a historic day. We see a woman waking up early to do household chores, her husband trying to procure funds to buy an auto-rickshaw, and their children playing gender-segregated games. Public spaces come alive with shrieking middle-schoolers, a mother folds clothes with a daughter who has made it out of the ghetto, a girl sleeps over at her grandparents' place – routines that become electrifying expressions of communal life.

Chavada's self-aware, theatrical framing blends fiction and reality, as does the use of non-professional actors in long, intimate shots. With transfixing passages of dead time and non-narrative digressions, he creates space for his characters to breathe freely, to just be. Quietly inheriting the powers of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1978), Which Colour? presents an India that we have never seen before.

– Srikanth Srinivasan