Little Terrorist

Jamal is a young Muslin living on the border between Pakistan and India. Venturing into the mine field in no man's land to recover a ball from his cricket match, Jamal is fired upon and, panicking, mistakenly flees across the wrong fence and finds himself pursued by soldiers believing him to be a terrorist. This little terrorist seems to be done for but an unlikely friend takes pity on him in the shape of school teacher Bhola.

A fairly simple film this one but one that has benefited from being topical in the west since all "our" focus is now very much in the Middle East. The film deals with the common ground between two sets of people and the human kindness that ultimately is bigger than the armed men who keep them apart. The message is simple enough and maybe some viewers will find it a bit too obvious but for me it did enough with the top level narrative to keep the subtext from being too clunky in the background. That said though, don't be coming to this expecting anything too insightful or intelligent.

As director though, Kumar is good, capturing rich colours of the locations and giving the film a good motion. The cast are fairly good but, as already said, Mehtaa's performance is the most memorable thanks to a lively character. Nothing brilliant here then but nothing that bad either. To a certain extent it did feel like it could have done more and, with a stronger script, could perhaps have built on its strengths to produce a more intelligent and meaningful message than the one it did.