Story of ISIS recruit veers towards propaganda

The Kerala Story

Director: Sudipto Sen

Cast: Adah Sharma, Yogita Bihani

Rating: 1/5

At the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) awards ceremony last year, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid called ‘The Kashmir Files’ a “vulgar propaganda movie”. He had to face vile attacks on social media. It shouldn’t therefore come as a surprise that some celebrate the release of an Islamophobic film. And the latest in the genre is ‘The Kerala Story’.

The film starts with a woman in a UN incarceration centre narrating the story of how she was indoctrinated into Islam and joined ISIS. It revolves around Shalini Unnikrishnan from Thiruvananthapuram who goes for higher studies to Kasargod. She meets three girls there, one of them scouting for terror recruits.

The film expounds on ‘love jihad’, with Hindu girls being lured in the name of love to convert to Islam, and some of them eventually becoming sex slaves for ISIS. During this journey, one of the girls, a Catholic, is traumatised but survives, while an atheist (raised by communist parents) realises the terrorist agenda and dies by suicide.

Director Sudipto Sen tries to prove the film is based on hard facts. When a girl delivers lines such as ‘50,000 girls in Kerala are missing’ and ‘The ex-chief minister has said Kerala will become an Islamic state’, it becomes clear that the director is inclined more towards propaganda than human storytelling. Even if one such real story exists, it needs to be told, but the aim here is to create hatred towards a particular community. Instead of sounding a warning about the dangers of religious fundamentalism, it ends up painting a dark picture of Islam.

Many things make the film a drag. It does not even pay lip service to Muslims who are opposed to ISIS. The scene where a girl tells her father that ‘love jihad’ is a result of the ‘imported’ ideology of communism is a laugh-out-loud moment. The Kerala Story comes with skewed intentions.