A naive girl Shalini (Adah) from Kerala, is pushed towards converting to Islam. She is not aware that she is falling into a trap that leads to becoming a terrorist. Soon she is forced to join the ISIS, and when she manages to escape, she finds herself arrested. She begins telling her story, and The Kerala Story unfolds.
Cinema has forever been a tool for manipulation. Be it the powerful using it as a tool to tell their stories with a whitewashed effect, or the cunning using it to earn even more than they already own. Between all of these are the two sides selling their agenda, trying to counter each other. One, as claimed, subtly, the other not so subtly. The Kerala Story sits right beyond both sides and sits somewhere in the lands where it fails to fit in reality with its idea of only black and white.
With no single word does this piece of in any way try to claim that everything said and claimed in this movie is wrong and there is no one who has been through this trauma. Terrorism is real; the worldwide syndicate of human trafficking for dubious means is an even more haunting reality. But when you make a movie about the same topic and shape it like fiction with no connection to the real world you and I live in, how are we supposed to take anything about this product as the hard truth?
Written by Sudipto Sen with Suryapal Singh, and Amrutlal Shah, The Kerala Story is a film that claims a lot but also forgets to substantiate what it says. Just like The Kashmir Files. Also, one must remember how Sen was on the jury at the International Film Festival Of India (IFFI), where chairperson Nadav Lapid called Vivek Agnihotri’s directorial a propoganda, and Sen was the first to distance himself from Lapid’s comments. Which means the ideology is somewhere similar.
The Kerala Story Movie Review: Sudipto Sen definitely doesn’t understand the importance of nuances and poignancy in making this movie