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Filmmaker Mayurica Biswas’s latest documentary, titled A Big Little Murder, opens up to a nondescript birthday celebration. It’s a bunch of eager children sitting around a birthday cake, all ready to blow out the ceremonial candles as they break into the customary Happy Birthday song.
Detailing the sequence of the events leading up to and after the seven-year-old’s killing, the incisive film, co-directed by filmmaker Pracheta Sharma, talks about the ‘murder’ of a ‘little’ boy, while raising a ‘big’ set of questions.
For the first time, the two-part film also brings to camera the parents and friends of the 17-year-old student accused of slashing the child’s throat in the school bathroom, resulting in his death. According to reports, the juvenile, a student of Class 11, had killed the seven-year-old in a bid to ‘delay a parent-teacher meeting and examinations’.
According to a friend, the juvenile accused had allegedly mixed poison in a female classmate’s water bottle to delay the parent-teacher meeting. This was confirmed by another student, whose identity has not been revealed.
If this incident is true, it raises a glaring set of questions:
By focusing on the psychological condition of the juvenile accused and those around him, Biswas’s film has once again reopened the debate on the mental health of children in schools.
The film reveals the exact nature of the child’s fatal injuries. The gashes were deep and could have only been executed with an intent to kill. Was the juvenile, accused of committing the murder, so disturbed that he didn’t think twice before slitting a kid’s throat?
While the documentary suggests that the juvenile accused could have been suffering from a form of depression, his parents have clearly denied any such a possibility. Arguing that their son is innocent, the juvenile’s father has raised a few questions, for instance, the absence of bloodstains on his son’s shirt.
The juvenile’s mother feels her son could not have been depressed because he kept on playing his keyboard. “If he was really depressed, how could he have continued playing the keyboard?” she asks in the film.
Mayurica Biswas asks, “Is this the tip of an iceberg that foreshadows a disturbing truth about young minds? Does it expose a systemic failure of every institution in the Indian society that is meant to nurture and safeguard the physical and emotional well-being of our children?”
She adds that the film goes beyond the question of the ‘Who?’ and delves deeper into the ‘Why?’
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