UW Cinematheque | New Indian Cinema: NASIR

NASIR
India | 2020 | DCP | 85 min. | Tamil with English subtitles
Director: Arun Karthick
Cast: Valavane Koumarane, Balasubramanian, Jensan Diwakar

Nasir chronicles a single day in the life of the title character, a Muslim salesman at a Hindu-owned sari shop. A hardworking and agreeable colleague who leads a mundane home life, Nasir’s ordinariness and self-effacing nature makes him endearing to everyone around him. Far from ordinary, Nasir the film offers a compelling and textured story that convincingly depicts a backdrop of extreme cultural nationalism and how Nasir’s life unwittingly gets caught in it. “A quiet plea for tolerance and an assertion of humanistic values in an era where such things can no longer be taken for granted, Nasir is all the more touching for its scrupulous avoidance of sentimentality and manipulation” (The Hollywood Reporter). (Darshana Sreedhar Mini)