The Terrorist, a film by Santosh Sivan about, you guessed it, a terrorist — named Malli, played by Ayesha Dharker — is curiously apolitical; what impact it has relies on the spectator's response to aesthetics rather than politics. Or else it posits, if you've read any Genet, that aesthetics are good reasons as any to make a martyr out of oneself. Also, since the movie emphasizes the social dynamics and rewards of belonging to a tight-knit terrorist group rather than simply individuals committed to a particular ideology it suggests we can better understand the motivations of such young and seemingly naive suicide bombers. In an interview with David Walsh Sivan says as much:

Here you have a group of young people, mostly teenagers. They are deprived of any kind of education, sex life, smoking, everything is considered harmful, and invariably most of them go off by the time they're 22. All of them are made to believe that being a martyr is the biggest thing to happen, and they're given fantastic funerals. It is like the ultimate high for a person in that kind of environment.

The gorgeous cinematography, also by Sivan, illustrates differences in perspective, ideological and otherwise, through a constantly gliding camera, a shallow depth of field and selective focus: For instance a young boy who had just helped Malli cross a river undetected intently watches her leaving; on the left side of the frame, completely out-of-focus, several agitated human-shaped blobs take the attention away from the boy's face: he is oblivious to everything except his departing friend. Moments later the camera focuses on Malli in the boat while a single gunshot and Malli's startled expression tells us all we need to know. The moment is made all the more poignant by the fact that the boy was uninterested in Malli's politics and had in fact tried to persuade her not to go through with her plans.