28 Years of Maachis (25/10/1996)

28 Years of Maachis (25/10/1996).

Maachis is a period political thriller film directed by #Gulzar and produced by R. V. Pandit. It stars #OmPuri, #Tabu, Chandrachur Singh, Jimmy Sheirgill, Suneel Sinha, Kanwaljit Singh, Ravi Gossain, and Raj Zutshi in the lead roles. Songs by Vishal Bhardwaj & Gulzar.

The film portrays the circumstances surrounding the rise of the Sikh insurgency in Punjab in the 1980s and traces the transformation of a youth from a boy next door to an angry person bent on wreaking vengeance, upon receiving gross injustice from the political system and sidelined being labelled as terrorist, to make it easy to kill him without any state accountability.

The title is used as a metaphor that conveys that the youth of any nation are matchsticks that could ignite due to deficiencies in the political and policing systems. Maachis is a film about what atrocities can drive an ordinary human to do. It looks back at the Punjab problem and tries to figure out some of the root causes.