“A promising and deeply felt first feature”

Land is never just land. For those who own it, it means property, capital, and the power to decide who gets to live from it. For those who work it without ever being allowed to claim it, the same earth carries a different promise: dignity and the possibility of shaping their own lives. In Birds in the Dark, Shashank Walia brings this unequal relationship into conversation with queer desire, caste oppression and collective resistance. His debut feature has a remarkably large canvas, attempting to hold these struggles together without reducing one to a metaphor for another.

The film follows Jagtar, a police informer who returns to his village after freeing Amir, a Kashmiri Muslim man he had wrongly captured. Home offers little comfort. Jagtar is a stranger in a place that should be familiar, still entangled with Raman, his wealthy former lover, whose possessiveness makes their relationship another form of captivity. Meanwhile, Jagtar’s childhood friend Dilraj, a landless farm labourer, is organising workers to reclaim the common village land monopolised by the powerful. When Amir arrives in search of Jagtar, the lives of these characters begin to converge. Their personal desires unfold alongside a larger struggle over who has the right to love, to labour, to belong and, ultimately, to decide the shape of their own lives.

What makes the film compelling is its understanding that these questions cannot be separated so neatly. Jagtar and Amir’s love exists in a society that offers little recognition to their relationship, while Dilraj confronts a system in which caste determines who owns the land and whose labour can be exploited. Raman’s wealth gives him authority that extends into his intimacy with Jagtar. The private and the political continually disturb each other. Love can become a means of control, but it can also offer the beginnings of solidarity. Dilraj’s struggle is not simply about possessing a piece of earth. It is about changing the conditions under which people are forced to live at the mercy of those who already hold power.

Dilraj is central to this vision. Her resistance gives the film a material ground, preventing its politics from dissolving into romantic longing or abstract ideas. She works the land while fighting for the right to claim it. For her, dignity means more than being recognised; it means having control over the conditions of one’s existence. Alongside her struggle, Jagtar and Amir search for a home and a future their society refuses to acknowledge. Walia’s generous idea is that solidarity does not require everyone to share the same struggle. It begins with recognising how different forms of dispossession speak to one another.

Shot in black and white, Birds in the Dark moves through the Punjabi countryside with a slow, visually poetic sensibility. The textures of the soil, crops, bodies and landscape acquire an austere beauty. Without colour, the images move between the physical reality of the place and something more elusive, almost dreamlike. The land is never merely a backdrop; it seems to carry histories that precede the characters and will outlast them. Walia’s background in cinematography is evident in his attention to the material world, and the film often finds its strongest expression when it allows an image to exist without immediately explaining what it means.

Yet the slowness does not always lead to beauty. At times, the film’s patient observation seems to pass over the very atmosphere it is trying to create. As Walia moves between queer love, caste, land, labour, and political resistance, the narrative occasionally becomes scattered. The different strands do not always settle into a convincing rhythm, and the film’s expansive approach can feel less like a river gathering its tributaries than several currents pulling in different directions. Its politics remain clear, but its emotional and visual movement sometimes loses focus. The challenge is not that the film has too much to say; it is that its many concerns do not always find the form they need to speak to one another.

Still, there is something admirable about the scale of Walia’s attempt. He refuses to treat queer love as an isolated question of identity or the struggle for land as a distant political backdrop. Instead, he searches for the connections between intimacy, labour, caste and freedom. Birds in the Dark does not fully realise the beauty of every possibility it opens up, but its ambition is genuine. In its darkness, there is oppression and uncertainty, but also the possibility of finding one another and imagining a different future. The film may stumble as it tries to contain so much, yet it remains a promising and deeply felt first feature, reaching towards a world where the right to love and the right to claim the earth belong to the same unfinished struggle.

(c) Image copyright – Two Black Squares Media