The Hour of Lynching
2019 · 18m · United Kingdom
Directed by Amit Madheshiya, Shirley Abraham
Genres: crime, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Through the 2018 lynching of dairy farmer Rakbar Khan by cow vigilantes in Haryana, a look at India's climate of hate crimes against Muslims — filming both the victims' families and the unrepentant perpetrators.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects moral clarity from a film about lynching—Madheshiya and Abraham refuse to deliver it, sitting unflinching with the perpetrators' faces and logic, which is either the most necessary provocation or a misfire, and I'm genuinely unsure which means it's working.
The formal architecture here—cutting between grief-stricken families and the casual ideology of their hunters—recalls the essay-film tradition of Farocki and Massimo D'Anolfi, a measured confrontation with complicity that trusts the viewer's intelligence rather than their outrage.
The decision to film the perpetrators with the same durational patience as the victims' families is the entire film: it's a technical choice about whose time matters, whose story gets space to breathe, and it lands like a blade.
Reviews
The film spills devastating details of a new order that has found its foot in India. The filmmakers follow not just Khan's kin, but also his murderers who shrug off any responsibility of his death.