Aakrosh

Bhaskar Kulkarni, a young lawyer appointed by the court, is given the defence of Lahanya Bhiku, accused of killing his wife. The accused is an Adivasi, and the strangest thing about the case is that he will not say a word. The more the lawyer tries to help, the deeper the silence grows; his rage and helplessness can be read only in his eyes. As Kulkarni digs into the file he runs into an order of silence kept by landowners and local officials. The film is less about solving a murder than about why a man cannot speak. The conditions in which the scheduled tribes of India live are the ground of the account. Om Puri plays the accused, Naseeruddin Shah the lawyer and Smita Patil the woman who was killed. Vijay Tendulkar wrote the screenplay and the film is Govind Nihalani’s first work as a director, completed in 1980 at a hundred and forty four minutes.