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Bheed Movie Review : A brave portrayal of the plight of migrant workers during lockdown

• Times Of India

In-depth Analysis

Our overall critic’s rating is not an average of the sub scores below.

Bheed - Official Teaser

Bheed - Official Hindi Trailer

Users' Reviews

Refrain from posting comments that are obscene, defamatory or inflammatory, and do not indulge in personal attacks, name calling or inciting hatred against any community. Help us delete comments that do not follow these guidelines by marking them offensive . Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.

Bhargavi Murali 536 days ago

Must watch for people living in illusion.

Shamili Vimal 539 days ago

Vinod kumar singh gautam 549 days ago.

Good effort to sketch out the cruel and forgotten story of the migrant workers. The man made catastrophe led the whole nation bleeding......

Shyam Gupta 614 days ago

कुछ फिल्में और ऐसी बननी चाहिए, 2024 से पहले । मजदूरों की दुर्दशा पर सरकार का रूखापन लोग भूल गए हैं , चुनावी रैली में हजारों बस ट्रेन चलाने वाले ये बेईमान नेता मजदूरों के लिए कोई इंतजाम नही कर पाए ? विश्वगुरु बन कर भी क्या करोगे ? Up बिहार के मजदूरों की दुर्दशा खुद वही मजदूर भूल गए हैं ।ऐसी फिल्में याद दिलाती रहेंगी।

Jai 615 days ago

Its a propaganda movie showing one side of the story. It doesn't show how Delhi govt drove out migrants overnight or why was the lockdown necessary.

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Bheed Reviews

Powered by persuasive performances by Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Kapur, and Aditya Srivastava, the film addresses the spectre of caste and class divide in the times of COVID-19.

Full Review | Jan 2, 2024

Bheed (written by Sinha, Saumya Tiwari and Sonali Jain) never comes across as surface level representation. Part of the reason being the film is telling a story we are acquainted with if not conversant with the details.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

Anubhav Sinha’s black-and-white film exposes social injustice with pieces arranged for a big bang, only to splutter and subside, but not before raising some uncomfortable questions.

Full Review | Jun 1, 2023

Furious but compassionate, bleak yet not entirely without hope, Bheed is a movie defined by duality — of its characters, its themes, and even its politics.

Full Review | May 28, 2023

Bheed offers a realistic and sometimes alarming look at how social class structures and prejudices can affect people in a crisis. It's a rare COVID-19 pandemic drama that isn't crassly exploitative of this deadly pandemic.

Full Review | Apr 5, 2023

Bheed equally suffers from its hesitancy to follow through on its convictions...

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

Most of the cast is excellent, even if the shot-taking descends into arthouse every-frame-a-painting territory. At least the film commits to its crowded ideas.

There’s a lesson for everyone in the film. The first and foremost lesson being how deeply ingrained the caste divide is.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 24, 2023

What Bheed might lack in depth and nuance, it makes up for with an underlying sense of urgency.

Bheed states the facts as is and doesn’t try to lace them with them anything fancy or unreal. A few cinematic liberties definitely would have been taken and understandably so, but never to an extent that it completely washes out the truth.

Anubhav Sinha, in his cinematic portrayal of a certain phase of the pandemic, comes really close to the real-life trauma faced by thousands...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 24, 2023

With the context missing, this well-intentioned film becomes less than its powerful moving parts.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 24, 2023

The actors merge with the film's physical space to absolute perfection and achieve phenomenal emotional depth.

While Bheed is well-intentioned, it feels hurriedly written.

Anubhav Sinha has earned a reputation for questioning the establishment...at a time when it has become dangerous to do so... Cinematically, (Bheed) shines only sporadically, but as a mark of defiance against a repressive regime, it is remarkable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.75/5 | Mar 24, 2023

Taking a scalpel to the caste system, director Anubhav Sinha exposes how sub-castes and other divisions stamp out solidarity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 23, 2023

Bheed movie review: A grim and necessary reminder of a recent tragedy

Bheed movie review: it is clear why it was tempting to use the analogy of the partition, which anubhav sinha had to excise from the film. with the context missing, this well-intentioned film becomes less than its powerful moving parts..

One of the most shattering sights of the Covid-19 pandemic was the flood of people suddenly rendered rudderless by the announcement of one of the most stringent lockdowns in the world — chief amongst those were daily wagers, and blue collar workers who would starve if they couldn’t go out to their jobs. With no public transport available, they began the long walk home, some carrying all their worldly goods in plastic sacks, with their children, or the elderly, in tow. That the trek under the relentless summer sun of 2020 was going to be long and arduous didn’t seem to deter the migrants. The refrain was common: if I have to die, I want to be where I belong.

Anubhav Sinha’s ‘Bheed’, shot in greyed-out B&W, is a grim and necessary reminder of this recent tragedy, which already seems like a throwback. It’s clearly a case of pushing back memories of difficult times so they do not overwhelm the present. It’s also got to do with the concerted white-washing that began in right earnest — to take culpability and responsibility away from the state — even while the pandemic was raging. And some of that, being force-fitted into the narrative, seems to have taken the sting out of Sinha’s recreation.

Starting your film with the mandatory ‘poori tarah kaalpnik hai’ (it is completely imaginary) may be a pragmatic necessity, but taking the specificity out by not using names defeats the purpose — in which ‘pradesh’ is ‘Tejpur’ (the place where most the proceedings take place)? The declaration of the pandemic in the PM’s voice is missing (it was in the original trailer, but is replaced by another in the new one) and instantly that moment, which changed the lives of so many of us so drastically, becomes anodyne.

The film begins with a striking shot of humans milling about on screen, desperate to find a way out, piled on top of buses, cycles, anything that moves. You can see why it was tempting to use the analogy of the Partition (which Sinha had to excise from the film; there are a few other bits which feel censored). With the context missing, this well-intentioned, lest-we-forget film becomes less than its powerful moving parts.

In many ways, ‘Bheed’ feels like a companion piece to ‘Article 15’, in which Sinha had raised the scourge of caste effectively, but was called out for doing it through the prism of an upper caste ‘hero’. In this one, he does a course correction by making the lower caste Surya Kumar Singh Tikas (Rajkummar Rao) — who hides his origins under the honorific ‘Singh’ because that’s what his father did — the person who is ‘in-charge’. But how can a man like Tikas, buoyed by his cop uniform but living with a permanent fear of being found out, actually be in charge, surrounded by the Sharmas and Trivedis who fling the hierarchy of their birth in his face? When Rajkummar Rao, in a stand-out performance as Tikas, cries out, ‘hamein bhi hero banana hai’ , it sears.

It is his story which is the most interesting in this ensemble piece, which has a host of characters, all stuck at this barrier created by a lethal virus, and an even more lethal caste system, which overrides class. On one side are the high born, wealthy people like a mother (Dia Mirza) making a dash in her fancy SUV to pick up her daughter from her hostel before her husband gets there; a watchman called Balram Trivedi (Pankaj Kapur) who is so full of bile and bigotry that he will not allow his hungry companions to eat the food served from a Muslim man (the Tablighi Jamaat being virus-spreaders is mentioned: remember how viral WhatsApp forwards and venomous TV anchors spread that rumour?); a TV reporter (Kritika Kamra) and her crew become the voice of the liberal, but misguided urbanites who don’t understand or care to parse the divisions on the ground; Tikas’s superior (Ashutosh Rana) who has great knowledge of minute social divisions ( ‘acchha tum Tikas ho,’ he tells Surya, ‘hum toh Somas samjhe thay’ ), but has little empathy for others not as privileged as him. The trouble with making people ‘types’, representative of their class/caste, is evident in the way they declaim, their self-serving statements coming off as dialogues rather than conversation.

There are some faces in the crowd that the camera stays on more than the others. A girl accompanying her alcoholic father home, emerging from a cement mixer, gets more time than the others. And then you move along, with the ‘bheed’ , as the people are pushed and shoved and showered by dehumanizing canons of disinfectant, their feet bleeding: the sight of that droplet of blood leaves you with that same angry, sick feeling as it did back then, when you saw that image in the newspaper.

What you are left with most vividly is Tikas and his love for a local doctor called Renu Sharma (Bhumi Pednekar), whose surname says it all. I wanted more of these two, and left the theatre wondering what happens to them when they do pick up the courage to go to her village, and confront her father. Will they be left alive, or will age-old prejudice kill them? Rajkummar Rao’s face, so full of the pain and injustice he has been forced to internalise all his life, finally acknowledges and embraces who he is: that face, in the generic ‘bheed’, becomes a despairing yet hopeful beacon for our times.

Bheed movie cast: Ashutosh Rana, Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Kapur, Bhumi Pednekar, Dia Mirza, Virendra Saxena, Kritika Kamra Bheed movie director: Anubhav Sinha Bheed movie rating: 2.5 stars

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Bheed movie review: Anubhav Sinha's lockdown tale is a difficult watch that hits you hard

Bheed movie review: rajkummar rao and bhumi pednekar headline anubhav sinha's latest social drama on the exodus of migrant workers during first lockdown..

‘Ghar se nikal kar gaye the, ghar se hi aa rahe hain aur ghar hi jaa rahe hain’. This line in Bheed said by a migrant worker just stayed with me. Narrating the horrific unfolding of events during the unprecedented mass migration amid the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020, Anubhav Sinha’s Bheed is brutally honest. High on shock value, it makes your heart ache seeing the hardships and humiliation that thousands of migrants went through during the pandemic. (Also read: All That Breathes review: This Oscar nominee from India is visually stunning doc on need to co-exist )

On March 24, 2020, when a nationwide lockdown was announced and state borders were closed to prevent the outbreak of the coronavirus, several migrants who had shifted to cities in search of work, were forced to go back to their native villages. Bheed is an account of what exactly these migrant families suffered.

Sinha has not only chosen a difficult story to tell but he ensures he makes it an equally difficult watch. Shot in stark black and white, Bheed doesn’t let you breathe. If anything, it chokes you, leaving a lump in your throat at several gut-wrenching scenes. Sinha shows no restrain when it comes to showing the pain and plight of these workers. The shocking visuals of migrants sleeping on the railway tracks and being run over by a train, families walking barefoot for miles with bleeding toenails and wounded soles, hungry kids crying and being thrashed by their helpless mums, a watchman trying to arrange food, people hiding in cement mixers, Muslims feeding their own and everyone around, but still being cornered and called names. Even though Sinha doesn’t resort to blood or gore in the shocking scenes, you still feel the impact of his story. Bheed highlights, and fights more inner demons and societal biases, than only the struggles of migrant workers who walked for days and nights wishing to reach their homes in times of crisis. Some did make it, while others did not.

Bheed talks to us through the story of Surya Kumar Singh Tikas (Rajkummar Rao), a young cop who is made the incharge of the checkpost at one of the state borders that’s now closed. He is in love with Renu Sharma (Bhumi Pednekar) who is a doctor and is currently taking care of symptomatic patients stuck at the check-post. There’s Singh saab (Aditya Shrivastava) who is Rao’s subordinate but clearly doesn’t want to obey orders. Among the migrants on the other side of the barricading, there’s Dia Mirza from the privileged class in her Fortuner, who doesn’t flinch an eyelid when the driver Kanaiya (Sushil Pandey) offers to bribe the cops to let them cross the border. Then, there’s Trivedi Babu (Pankaj Kapur) who only wants to save his ailing brother and help the fellow passengers in the bus get some food from the nearby closed mall. He insists he won’t steal but would pay for it. There’s also a young girl carrying her alcoholic father on a bicycle. Amid all this, Vidhi Tripathi (Kritika Kamra) as a TV journalist is covering all this from angles that she can see, or at times, through her cameraman Nasir Munir’s lens.

At 114 minutes, Bheed neither wastes time building the premise nor its core characters. I must credit the director here for so convincingly introducing each character to us without delving too much into their back stories yet telling enough. The story that Sinha has co-written Saumya Tiwari and Sonali Jain manages to keep you intrigued. It’s the writing, I feel, that’s a true winner. There are dialogues cleverly peppered with an underlined sarcasm that you can’t miss. ‘Hamara nyaay hamari aukaat se bohot bahar hai’ or ‘Gareeb aadmi ke liye kabhi intezaam nahi hota’ are some lines that hit you hard.

There’s a scene with Kritika Kamra draws an analogy with an overloaded straw-truck with that of society and the fear that it may end up getting scattered and turn into a divided crowd, is extremely well-written. Another well shot moment is when Kapur ridicules the healthcare staff dressed in PPE kits and calls them ‘nautanki’ while they are testing his brother for Covid symptoms. These all remind us of how actually millions of people behaved when first wave of Covid hit our shores.

However, some portions did appear excessive. For instance, I didn’t understand the context of ingesting a lovemaking scene between Rao and Pednekar. Yes, it was important to distinctly underline the class divide in their relationship, but there were ample strong scenes later in the film through which the point could be well conveyed. The sex scene was surely avoidable. Then, you sense the constant hammering on the caste bias in our society with Rao’s character being targeted by everyone. That, to me, appeared a bit too much. I wouldn’t say it takes away from the core focus on the pain of migrants, but it does bring a shift of emotions when Rao’s story takes precedence over the main issue. And why weren’t the cops wearing mask? I mean you preach only what you follow.

Story aside, some really nuanced performances additionally make Bheed a great watch. I won’t be exaggerating if I term is as one of the finest ensemble casting in recent times. Rao and Pednekar are in top form with their dialect, body language, confidence and the way they emote on screen. Their strength and vulnerability both touch you. Mirza looked flawless playing a flawed character of a rich woman whose patience is tested in trying times and she lets her circumstances dictate her choice of actions and words. Kapur is exceptional and wins you over with his brilliance in each frame. He displays calm while politely asking cops for an outcome of a political meeting about the opening of borders, and shows aggression when it comes to fighting for his own people. Rana and Shrivastava add gravitas to the narrative with some heavyweight dialogues, and their expressions. Kamra’s track started off as a narrator and had pivotal pieces to join initially, but eventually doesn’t get much scope to shine or leave an impact.

Overall, Bheed states the facts as is and doesn’t try to lace them with them anything fancy or unreal. A few cinematic liberties definitely would have been taken and understandably so, but never to an extent that it completely washes out the truth. Sinha keeps the tussle between the class, power, caste and religion on till the very last minute. And the end credits aptly sum up the migrant crisis and their unforgettable pain with Herail Ba. Watch it if you truly care to know the truth and what happened with those thousand of migrants who were rendered homeless due to the pandemic without any fault of theirs.

• Migrant Workers
• Anubhav Sinha
• Rajkummar Rao

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User reviews

BHEED is better than you think

• indiancoasterenthusiast
• Mar 24, 2023

In to the darkest time, not a great one but very near to it.

• roshancrast
• Apr 1, 2023

Society which forgets it's interconnectedness, turns into 'Bheed' ( i.e., mob)

• Mar 23, 2023

Above average film

• pranav-dragonlord

They wander, they suffer, but they endure. They are never quite defeated and their survival is itself a triumph.

• Fella_shibby
• Sep 14, 2023

Magnifies the Societal Vices on the Big Screen

• May 27, 2023

Wear The Mask On Eyes To Avoid This Infection

• SAMTHEBESTEST

The most negative reviews are for the politicle reason

• Mar 27, 2023

A serious movie on exodus of migrant labour in lockdown

• madanmarwah
• May 25, 2023

Zero storyline

• akankshaagrawal-13280

Migrant workers struggle during the pandemic nicely shown

• joelnoronha179
• rmaheta_wed

An exhilarating piece of cinema potraying the aftermaths of a contagion is what This motherland craved for

• yadavharsh-00681
• Oct 3, 2024

An exhilarating piece of cinema potraying the aftermaths of a contagion. A gritty and brave document capturing the mindsets of millions.

• arish-29343
• Mar 28, 2023

"If you know your history, you would know where you're coming from."

• chand-suhas
• Sep 16, 2023

What's the point of the black and white

• rahulbats-679-146395
• May 26, 2023

Powerful and impactful depiction of the horrors of the countrywide lockdown.

• sonusabir12
• Mar 25, 2023

Anubhav Sinha's Bheed, starring Rajkummar Rao, Bhumi Pednekar, and Pankaj Kapur, is said to be based on the migration of labourers during the early days of lockdown in 2020. T

One of the finest example of story telling, what was the need to.

• VeekeyBharti
• May 31, 2023

Anubhav Sinha is back with another relevant film

• mayankshukla1404
• May 29, 2023

Pathetic Script / Bad story telling / Wrong timing

• janakbesearch

A must watch depicting the real life event of COVID-19 lockdown

• nareshkumarnk-87454

makes a hat-trick of bad films

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This film is saying a very big thing very quietly

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Bheed Review: Anubhav Sinha’s Portrait of the Lockdown Succeeds More Than it Fails

Director: Anubhav Sinha

Writers: Sonali Jain, Saumya Tiwari, Anubhav Sinha

Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Bhumi Pednekar, Pankaj Kapur, Ashutosh Rana, Aditya Srivastava, Dia Mirza, Kritika Kamra, Virendra Saxena

It says something about the modern relationship between the state of art and the art of state that Bheed will firstly be known as a ‘brave’ film. Its identity will always be linked to its courage. Bheed , meaning “crowd”, tells a story shaped by the chaos of the 2020 migrant exodus. The film is set in the weeks following the sudden announcement of India’s first Covid-19 lockdown, back when institutional apathy led crores of marooned workers in the cities to depart for their villages on foot. The images of their internal displacement made global headlines, citing comparisons to the Partition of 1947. In other words, here’s a mainstream Hindi movie – with a solid cast to boot – about India’s most recent government-induced tragedy. That it exists, in whatever capacity, is commendable. But is a film like Bheed good solely by virtue of being important? That’s the Anubhav Sinha Question.

Sinha’s movies often say the right (or left?) things, but they’re also undercut by a bleeding-heart-liberal aesthetic. Some of it feels like Twitter Filmmaking, a syndrome defined by urban storytellers building socially expressive stories as a reaction to online discourse. The director’s rage is either too verbose ( Mulk ), too righteous ( Article 15 ) or too pretentious ( Anek ). Given the circumstances, however, I’d say Bheed succeeds more than it fails. For starters, the narrative scale is tactful. It goes for a single situation – one that serves as a microcosm of a country on the brink – rather than a broad and sprawling sweep of time. Much of the film unfolds over the course of an afternoon at a check post between two unnamed states – where several colliding characters represent the several stricken sections of society. As a result, there’s a real-time urgency to the film. Nothing is certain, the law keeps shifting shape, and information is as invisible as the victims of a developing economy. What we see, then, is the map and machinations of India condensed into the parameters of an outdoor chamber drama. The symbolism isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s efficient. 

No border and conflict is spared. There’s a bit of caste: An “in-charge” cop, Surya Kumar Singh (Rajkummar Rao), is torn between the oppressive morality of his job and the trauma of his hidden surname. There’s a bit of science: His girlfriend, Renu Sharma (Bhumi Pednekar), is an on-duty doctor and the only voice of reason there. There’s a bit of religion: After seeing the news of the Tablighi Jamaat hotspot on ‘Fakebook,’ a bus full of famished security guards and their families, led by a frantic Trivedi (a terrific Pankaj Kapur), refuses to accept meal packets from a bus full of Muslims. There’s a bit of Parasite -inspired class: Stranded in her Toyota Fortuner, a wealthy woman (Dia Mirza) expects the full servitude of her driver (Sushil Pandey) while joking about ‘their’ strong immunity. She keeps an eye on a poor teenage girl and her alcoholic father, convinced that the girl might find a secret route the way rats find an escape. There’s also a bit of journalism: An idealistic news anchor (Kritika Kamra) stays at odds with a cynical photojournalist (Karan Pandit) while covering the crisis. And, of course, there’s a bit of visual form. I’d like to believe that the black-and-white palette is a heavy-footed nod to social disparity and the late photojournalist Danish Siddiqui’s portraiture of suffering – and not a defiant ode to Schindler’s List (1993), the film most cited by the defenders of The Kashmir Files (2022). (Sinha has said in an interview that he chose to film in black and white to signal a similarity to the experiences of those who survived the violent migration of Partition.)

One might argue that the staging is self-conscious. For instance, an empty mall in the middle of nowhere looks too planted. The mall will naturally play a role in the face-off between the hungry migrants and the police; it will prompt lyrical ramblings about “aukaat” and boundaries. The transformation arc of Surya Kumar, too, seems inevitable, as though he were a lovechild of the protagonists from Newton (2017) and Article 15 (2019). Ditto for an overwrought Incredible India debate between the two journalists. There are classic film-school oversells. Like the shot of the reporters eating lunch while wondering why the nearby villages aren’t feeding the migrants. Or the anchor’s penchant for introspective observations (the sort that equate ‘samaaj’ and ‘bheed’) that double up as voiceovers. The first scene of the film is especially strange. It features something brutal – a tired family dozes off on a railway track at night; a train approaches – but plays out more like a parody of poverty. They look and converse like Raju Rastogi’s black-and-white-film family members from 3 Idiots (2009).

Yet there’s a lot to like about Bheed . Its politics are more suggestive than aggressive, evident in how the virus is as inconspicuous as the government. One is sensed, the other is feared. We never actually see the few people with Covid-19 symptoms, just as we never hear of the orders from above. I like that the film plays out like a lost chapter of history. Our engagement stems from our own relationship with the past. There’s the duality of watching a high-stakes thriller while being aware that every victory – a hopeful ending, a coming-of-age journey, a diffusion of violence – is only a lesser form of defeat. Consequently, we watch things unfold with a tinge of sympathy, knowing that this is only the beginning of a long and unequal lockdown. The intent is to show that survival is a great equalizer. But there’s also a sense that humans practice prejudice to explain injustice the same way they embrace religion to explain grief. Trivedi, for example, is so disturbed by his inability to feed his community that he wields his upper-caste Hinduism as a fading weapon. When the reporter, Vidhi, requests to interview Surya about the “Muslim bus,” he asks her if that’s the only story she sees there. Similarly, Surya’s boss (Ashutosh Rana) and bitter rival (Aditya Srivastava) say the term ‘naxalite’ like it isn’t part of their personal vocabulary. You can sense that their language is a coping mechanism, a tool to rationalize the pain of being underpaid puppets.    

I like that Bheed subscribes to the cinema of perspective, too. The events on the day play out like a war movie, in which a hollow concept of patriotism makes the soldiers turn on each other. What’s happening pales in comparison to what is, which is why Bheed rarely feels as smug as Sinha’s last few films. The little touches of craft help. A well-performed sex scene establishes Surya as an overthinker, a worrier who is cursed with the gift of processing the world differently than his colleagues. The character doesn’t always work – particularly in the physical final act – but Rao’s acting gives the film an emotional fulcrum. Some scenes insist on telling instead of showing, literally spelling out the composition of frames. Fortunately, the rhythm doesn’t allow the viewer to dwell on these issues. 

Most of the cast is excellent, even if the shot-taking descends into arthouse every-frame-a-painting territory. At least the film commits to its crowded ideas. This ensures that when the controversial Partition line is muted, the sudden silence raises even more awareness about the weight of these words. The gag ironically reflects the core theme of Bheed , a movie that’s all about cries falling on deaf ears. It’s where the art of the state unwittingly elevates the state of art. And it’s where Bheed graduates from euphemistic adjectives like brave. After all, what is dissent today if not the dialect of decency?

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Bheed (2023)

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Bheed is a good film, but it’s precisely the sort of film that hasn’t been appreciated due to how heavy it is, especially released just right after the pandemic. In the future, maybe a decade or so from now, it might finally get the attention it deserves.

What it's about

COVID-19 raised concerns about sanitation and cleanliness, but in a society that just banned discrimination against “impure” castes seventy years ago, these concerns feel reminiscent of previous caste prejudice. Writer-director Anubhav Sinha presents this social inequity through Bheed, a black-and-white drama set in a fictional checkpoint as the lockdown restricted travel between different Indian states. As the people in the checkpoint wait for the updated government regulations, tensions rise between the officers and the travelers, as the stuck migrants worry about hunger, thirst, and infection. While it’s definitely a heavy film to watch, this film doesn’t exploit the pandemic as fodder for drama. Instead, Bheed realistically portrays how a crisis like COVID-19 exacerbates existing social inequity.

What stands out

As a 2023 film, the most immediate thing that makes Bheed stand out is that it’s shot in black and white. While not unheard of, it’s a deliberate choice in a film industry that already has the option of color shots, stunning special effects, and out-of-this-world CGI. In 21st century films, this choice has been made for films depicting dark historical events or highly intimate characters contemplating existence. It’s a fitting choice for Bheed. Undoubtedly, 2020 will be remembered as a dark time in history, and with its depiction of inequity, the black-and-white style links this historical event with the neorealist themes present in many 1940s films. Bheed uses this callback as a reminder that inequity persists, and hasn’t left despite modern advances.

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