The image of the outsider is best portrayed by the figure of an African man in Delhi,” filmmaker Dibakar Das Roy tells us, as his debut feature Dilli Dark, about a Nigerian man’s experiences in the capital, gears for theatrical release on May 30. 

For the director, the drive to centre his satire about colourism and racial discrimination in Indian society on an African protagonist was as political as it was personal. There were the news reports of vicious attacks on the African community, but there were also Das Roy’s own personal struggles with fitting in when he was first sent to boarding school in the north after his early years in Kolkata. “The average guy there wasn’t as dark as me,” recalls the filmmaker who says that those experiences made him approach Dilli Dark’s story from “a subliminal angle”.