‘Black White & Gray’ director Pushkar Mahabal on upending true crime: ‘We have no time for nuance’

By vividly challenging the true crime project’s claim to verity and certitude, Pushkar Mahabal’s Black White & Gray elegantly upends the filmmaking genre.

The six-episode Hindi series on Sony LIV has two parallel strands. Filmmaker Daniel Gray is pursuing a true crime documentary about a set of murders attributed to a young man. In the other strand, actors play characters associated with these killings. But like the fake found footage in the horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999), the documentary within Black, White & Gray is fiction, designed to demolish the notion of absolute truth.

The series seeks to remind viewers that a sensational crime may never give up its secrets. What we see and hear could be a feint rather than fact, which makes a final judgement difficult or even impossible.

The series stars Mayur More and Palak Jaiswal as characters known only as the Boy and the Girl. In the mock documentary segment, Sanjay Kumar Sahu plays the alleged killer, who pleads his innocence.

Mahabal worked in television before making his first feature, the acclaimed thriller Welcome Home, in 2020. The 40-year-old filmmaker spoke to Scroll about the ideas that went into Black, White & Gray and the slippery charms of true crime. Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

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