Black Warrant

Like the Baltimore law enforcers in The Wire, the jailers in Black Warrant struggle with the myriad complexities of their job, challenges and conflicts to which dumb brute force cannot — should not — be the answer. Hindi prison narratives are typically jailbreak stories or cloying wrongful incarceration dramas. In Black Warrant, we are told that a disproportionate number of inmates in Tihar are innocent undertrials. Yet, most of the prisoners we get to know over seven episodes admit to some form of criminal offence. A sense of fascinating unease permeates the series. It distinguishes the slow, arduous work of reform from binary notions of innocence and guilt.