Manoj Bajpayee carries this slow-pace survival drama on his shoulders

For most parts while watching Joram, my eyes were stuck on the authentic look the characters. With their multiple earrings, three nose rings and beautifully placed hair pins. For some, it may act as a distraction, but I lauded the sheer effort director Devashish Makhija put in making the characters in his story look as real as possible.

Joram might not be an outright massy, commercially viable cinema, but it makes you sit back and notice the attention given to minute details that add to the experience. I loved how Joram starts with Dasru Karketta aka Bala (Manoj Bajpayee) and his wife Vaano (Tannishtha Chatterjee) happily singing a folk song while she is swinging on a rope swing. It switches to them as migrants in a dungeon-like a room in Mumbai, where they are singing the same song, but the smiles have gone now, and swing is now made of a cloth and there lies their three-month-old daughter, Joram.

A tale of man versus nature, the film mounts its premise on the tribes from Jharkhand who fight for their survival and are turning victims at the cost of development. The film talks about the time when the open lands of Jharkhand have been sold to a mega-company (named Pragati Steel) for mining iron, and it has resulted in felling of thousands of trees. Even the water in the rivers is depleting and the community of tribals is forced to vacate the lands where they claim they have lived on for over 2000 years. Leader of Adivasi community, Phulo Karma (Smita Tambe) is the mind behind this deal, but there are more layers to her character than what is presumed in the beginning of the film. At first when Dasru shifts from Jhinpindi, Jharkhand to Mumbai, he’s only running away from his troubled past as a maoist. But, soon, Dasru’s world is shattered on seeing his wife brutally murdered. He’s forced to run for his life with his daughter strapped to him in a sling. Sub inspector Ratnakar (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) has been sent to capture Dasru, and for reasons best known to him, he keeps telling his men, ‘Marna nahi hai, zinda pakadna hai (he has to be caught alive)’.