Nilaanjan Datta’s film Shadow Assassins had a commercial release in December 2022 and then won a clutch of awards for its lead actor Anurag Sinha. The film has been selected for numerous festivals in India and abroad, the latest being the Jaipur International Film Festival in January 2025. It also got the Best Film Special Award at the Eastern European Film Festival in 2025, and has been selected for the Berlin Lift-Off Film Festival in 2025.
Based in Mumbai at present, Datta grew up in the Northeast and is heavily invested in stories from the region.
His previous film, The Head Hunter (2015), is an ode to the glorious naturescape of Arunachal Pradesh, the state where Datta spent some of his high school days, his father being posted there as a banker. This film shows the contempt and misconceptions among city folk about forest tribes; the environmental destruction caused by the unbridled greed for development; and the ease with which simple people can be tricked into losing what they treasure the most.
About Shadow Assassins, for which Datta is in talks with streaming platforms to reach a wider audience, he tells Sanchita Guha, representing Connected to India, that it “did not get the kind of traction” that the film team had hoped for in India when it was first released — because of the aftermath of the pandemic, and the arrival of a Hollywood blockbuster that took over most of the screens.
“But [Shadow Assassins] did well when we released it in Singapore,” he adds. “It was released in February 2023 in Singapore and did pretty well there.”
This film was “not particularly made for festivals”, says Datta. “I made Shadow Assassins for the mass [audience], so the language that I used in this film was not what I did in my previous film, The Head Hunter. I diluted down the craft, so that it would be acceptable to the people.”
Nonetheless, Datta reached out to a few festivals, as Shadow Assassins had a very strong subject. The film’s commercial release ruled out its entry into some of the top global festivals, but the overall response from the alternative and new festival circuit has been far better than what the director expected.
Shadow Assassins has quite the USP, as the true perpetrators of the secret killings in Assam remain a mystery to this day. These were different from terrorism-related killings of that time in other conflict-riddled parts of India, such as Punjab and Kashmir. Entire families in Assam were wiped out by masked men whose identities could never be uncovered.
Datta’s film is set in a period of the Nineties when the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), an armed separatist group, is active in the state. Several of these extremists have apparently laid down arms and become Surrendered ULFA (SULFA), but in fact they still possess a part of their weapons cache. The official security forces — the police and the paramilitary — are also not above suspicion.
This world of shadows, where corpses are found in fields and body parts in the rivers, swallows up the young protagonist Nirbhay Kalita (played by Anurag Sinha), whose brother is an ULFA commander. Unable to wipe itself clean of that stigma, the family suffers.
Through a montage of beautifully crafted scenes, Datta recreates the dark clouds of violence hanging over Assam even when the sun shines bright. He takes only a few minutes at the beginning to bring together the pieces of the picture. The rest of the film plays out like a thriller, in which we see the lead character’s downward spiral from a happy-go-lucky student to a wanted man.
Early in the film, there is a scene that leaves one shell-shocked — Nirbhay comes home to Assam from his Pune institute and there is teasing and laughter in the family, until… a group of masked men barge into the simple home and brutally snatch Nirbhay, giving no clear explanation why. Happiness turns into horror within the blink of an eye. In real life, “it happened exactly like that”, says Datta.
The character of Nirbhay Kalita is, in fact, based on someone the director knew at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, the film school where he was a faculty member until 2018.
In Assam, where people knew of the secret killings, the film was very well-received by the section of moviegoers that watched it, but before the word-of-mouth publicity and positive media reviews could translate into commercial success, Shadow Assassins had to be pulled from the theatres.
During its short theatrical run, the film managed to show today’s youth in Assam that there were many layers in the secret killings of the Nineties, and that extremist factional rivalry was not the only reason.
In spite of all its merits and the mainstream treatment, Shadow Assassins is still a film about the Northeast and not easy to sell in India, as Datta himself had said in an earlier interview.
On his plate, at the moment, are plans to make a film in Marathi, “an investigative horror film” based on a true event; a Telugu film that he might co-produce (but not direct) through his own company; and the biopic of a soldier.
As the talk turns to available spaces for the kind of cinema that independent filmmakers like Datta can access, we discuss whether OTT platforms are a boon or a bane for the art of cinema.
“To be very honest, OTT has the potential of breaking the barriers for regional cinema and bringing the stories to a wider audience, but are they doing it?” asks Datta. “[The OTT platforms] were doing it; they were sincerely doing it. A lot of independent films were coming on OTT. But I think that has got disrupted in the past two years. Now if you check the streaming content, most of it is coming from big production houses, driven by big stars. You will see the number of independent films going down.”
He adds, “I think the business pressures are taking over, but the brighter side is that because of the democratisation of the distribution scenario [in this digital medium], there might be new OTT players coming up. There is hope in that.”
What are his hopes for Shadow Assassins in the next few months? “I just hope that this film gets into a decent streaming platform, and that people watch it. That’s my hope. I’m just pushing towards that. And maybe, all the bells and whistles it is getting at the [film] festivals will make the OTT [platforms] look at its worth,” he concludes.
(The article is published under a mutual content partnership arrangement between The Free Press Journal and Connected To India)