Not a Rumor

Short Film (2025)

Short film (5:54) 

Materials: Archival media, Bollywood samples, TV debate footage, iPhone footage, family audio, found video

Dimensions: Variable.

A non-linear ritual confronting racialized erasure, rumor, and Afro–Asian memory.

Sparked by the killing of 22-year-old Zimbabwean student Leeroy Ziweya in India, Not a Rumor weaves testimony, digital fragments, and circulating memory into a counter-archive of Afro–Asian erasure.

His death—treated as isolated—reveals how African presence remains hypervisible yet easily erasable within postcolonial systems shaped by caste, colorism, and colonial discipline.

Through fractured montage—WhatsApp chains, family stories, TV debates, and found footage—the film reconstructs a record that refuses disappearance.

A counter-archive.

Related writing

Co-opting African music, erasing Black lives: How anti-Black racism persists in India
Published in The News Minute, India (2026)

Fragments from Not a Rumor (2025)