The Goat Life

Najeeb leaves Kerala to work in the Gulf, planning to stay two years to support his family and come back. Nobody meets him at the airport; a man puts him and his friend in a car and takes them to a farm in the desert. His passport is taken. After that he herds goats for years: he is not paid, cannot wash, cannot speak to anyone, and there is no way out of the desert. Blessy writes and directs. Prithviraj Sukumaran plays Najeeb. The source is Benyamin's novel Aadujeevitham. It is a bestseller in Malayalam literature and rests on what happened to a real person. The film took over a decade to make. Prithviraj lost more than thirty kilos for the part and it was shot in the Jordanian desert in real conditions; production was also interrupted by the pandemic. The subject is migrant labour. The confiscation of passports from Indian workers in the Gulf and the sponsorship system are a real matter, and the film shows it not as an exception but as a functioning order. The desert passages are almost without dialogue; the narrative removes the sense of time, deliberately. The music is by A. R. Rahman. Who it is for: viewers who like survival narratives and Malayalam cinema. Who it is not for: it is very hard to watch, it runs long, and the last section raises the emotional pitch.