Amar Comrade Review | A Turbulent Portrait of Living History Punctuated By Glimmers Of Queer Joy

Amar Comrade (My Comrade) (2025), screened recently at the 16th KASHISH Pride Film Festival in Mumbai, centres on a terrain long bloodied by clashes. Directed by Tathagata Ghosh바카라�whose body of work has consistently traced narratives of the invisible and the dispossessed바카라�Amar Comrade marks another excavation into India바카라�s fractured socio-political psyche. Having previously explored queerness, identity, and violence in films like Jodi (If) (2024), Miss Man (2019), and The Scapegoat (2021), Ghosh returns with a delicately fierce political fable set amidst the eternally simmering tensions between the government, Naxal insurgents and tribal communities.

The film refuses to reduce these conflicts to mere political binaries. Instead, it illuminates a raw, palpable human experience that often unfolds at the margins. Amidst this turbulence, glimmers of queer joy emerge바카라�preciously borrowed from time. Starring Aratrick Bhadra, Sounak Kundu, and Adrija Majumder, its power lies not in the theatricality of rebellion but in the quiet dignity of those condemned to live history persistently, never granted the grace of calling it their past.

Ghosh began travelling extensively through West Bengal for the thrill of it rather than seeking a story. Inspired by the writing of Mahasweta Devi and real encounters with tribal communities, he discovered tales of displacement, queer desire and resilience. As violence persists in places like Bastar, Amar Comrade emerges as a poetic intervention바카라�an ephemeral ode to lands, loves, and lives that are otherwise rendered invisible. The film바카라�s spirit lies in its quiet mourning of a geography constantly disrupted바카라� cut, sold, rearranged, while simultaneously presenting it as the collateral damage of development. Amar Comrade is not interested in moral binaries. Instead, it asks the searing question: who is man to fracture land, redraw maps, and police the elemental, when it is the earth itself that birthed him?

While the film바카라�s primary lens focuses on the relationship between Nanda (Sounak Kundu) and Bikash (Aratrick Bhadra)바카라�it is actually shaped by the many tribal communities from the Jungle Mahal regions in West Bengal who supported the production behind the scenes. Whether through inputs in the screenplay, line production, or sourcing props바카라�the crew was hosted in their homes and welcomed into their daily lives. This reflects in the film바카라�s deep entanglement and loyalty to the community it portrays, not merely as setting, but as co-author.

The opening shot of Amar Comrade frames Nanda against an expanse of green, his gaze lifted toward a tree, axe in hand바카라�an arresting image that poses a subtle provocation: is this a resource to be claimed or a symbol to be defended? Nanda바카라�s gaze then shifts to a wounded rebel, Bikash, and something irrevocable happens. His eyes fixate, unblinking, as if summoned by a force both ancient and intimate. The tree and Bikash become inseparable in Nanda바카라�s emotional lexicon. In a quietly tender scene, he hugs the tree, and it becomes Bikash. The film doesn바카라�t explain this overlap바카라�it lets it exist as it is, tender and surreal. It blurs the lines between the people we love and the places we inhabit, between body and land, resistance and affection. Nanda바카라�s desire to help him is not framed in altruism but in compulsion. He doesn바카라�t know why he바카라�s drawn in, but it바카라�s relentless. In answering whether it is an act of political solidarity, romantic yearning, or simple human impulse바카라�the distinctions start to fade. Jhumri (Adrija Majumder), Nanda바카라�s wife, emerges as the silent but razor-sharp conscience of Amar Comrade. Deeply intuitive, she reads both the emotional temperature of her domestic space and the political climate outside with unnerving precision. A woman surrounded by the smoke of state and rebellion, she becomes the unexpected spokesperson for the moral tension that the film so meticulously builds.

There바카라�s a disarming tenderness in the tranquil spaces that Amar Comrade carves out between Nanda and Bikash바카라�intimate, unspectacular, yet electric in their subtext. When Nanda holds a glass to Bikash바카라�s lips or swats away flies while he eats, the authenticity is not performed but inhabited. Far from spectacle, these unglamorous rituals of care are radical in their transgressive softness, situated in a world that criminalises desire. This is a kind of queer joy that blooms precisely because it is hidden, fragile and forbidden. Nanda and Bikash바카라�s shared mourning and solitude becomes an emotional architecture in itself. They are not merely comrades in cause but in ache.

Ghosh believes that human faces are 바카라�landscapes of emotion바카라�. The cinematography by Tuhin responds to this philosophy with deliberate intimacy: lingering close-ups, lush green and patient wide shots contrasting with the urgent, handheld shots. Amar Comrade persistently uses red and green motifs together to signal the intertwined struggles of the communist movement and tribal communities against the government.

There바카라�s a devotional quality in how the sound design and film mix by Sugoto Basu and Anindit Roy renders this world. The rattling of leaves, chirps in the canopy or crackling of wood underfoot carries its own language바카라�as if the forest is in conversation with the characters as much as they are with it. There is no solitude in the silence, with the constant hum of nature throughout the film refusing to recede into the margins. Buru Sores Buru바카라�an original Santhali song written and performed by Kailash Chandra Murmu and Manikamani Murmu바카라� pulses from the very soil it praises. It has been recorded not in a studio, but in their home on a mobile phone. The imperfections of space, sound and medium become organic imprints of allegiance to both land and language. The rootedness in their voices and the intimacy of its making seeps into the film바카라�s fabric, mirroring the growing closeness between the characters as they lose themselves in the forest. The boundaries between humans and landscape blur, and the love of nature becomes inseparable from the nature of love itself.

This, perhaps, is where Amar Comrade succeeds most바카라�in making the past feel dangerously present. It could be any decade. It could be now. The continuity of oppression robs time of its meaning, forcing the viewer to confront history as a loop rather than a line. Amar Comrade thus becomes an extension of collective memory, but not one pinned to a linear timeline. It highlights the persistence of queer lives and stories in the remotest of corners still enduring hope against relentless violence. Amar Comrade evokes a mood, a murmur, a march, all at once. In giving voice to the marginalised, it does not rescue but listens. Ghosh proves that films rooted in specificity can still speak to the collective바카라�a rare work that knows exactly what it wants to say, and says it without compromise. Championing applause from audiences across international film circuits like the Toulouse Indian Film Festival, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Arizona International Film Festival and Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, Amar Comrade remains deserving of unwavering recognition and praise.

 Amar Comrade screened at the 16th edition of the Kashish Pride Film Festival, Mumbai.

Sakshi Salil Chavan is a documentary filmmaker and an entertainment writer based in Mumbai.