Not A Rumor

Not A Rumor is a non-linear cinematic mixtape sparked by the murder of Zimbabwean student Leeroy Kundai Ziweya in India — weaving Afro–Asian encounters, resistance, and remembrance into a meditation on violence, caste, and survival.

 

In August 2025, Leeroy, a 22-year-old student in Punjab, was killed outside his university. The tragedy was framed as isolated, even as Africans across South Asia have long faced harassment, stereotyping, and racialized violence. The film takes this act as its trigger — not to reconstruct events, but to trouble the ease with which anti-Black violence is minimized, renamed, or dismissed as rumor.

 

Working through collage, Not A Rumor remixes fragments of the Afro–Asian archive:

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• a beachside exchange from Mississippi Masala

• a 2016 Indian television debate on racism between Africans and Indians

• everyday gestures — hands eating in a South Indian restaurant, young men dancing, spectral images of Leeroy standing on water

 

Scored with Bollywood nostalgia, East African singeli, and Gregory Isaacs, the film moves between tenderness and terror, humor and horror, rumor and truth.

 

This is not documentary but rupture — a ritual of witnessing where hearsay becomes history and the archive begins to tremble.

 

It extends BlindianProject’s commitment to mapping Black × South Asian entanglements — not as abstraction, but as lived, precarious terrain.

 

A counter-record.

 

A community testimony.

 

A refusal to let erasure write the final word.