British crime film, BLUFF will soon be coming to Digital Platforms courtesy of Indie Rights.
Synopsis: Detective Sergeant Daniel Miller is suspended from the London Metropolitan Police so that he can be secretly deployed to a small English town on an undercover assignment to uncover Britain's major suppliers of heroin and crack cocaine. He poses as a heroin addict and manipulates an unsuspecting junkie into working with him so that he can infiltrate the local drug network and work his way up the supply chain. The line between duty and criminality begins to blur as Miller’s investigation becomes increasingly dangerous the closer he gets to finding the source of a drug trafficker.
BLUFF stars Gurj Gill, Jason Adam, Nisaro Karim, James Jaysen Bryhan & Joe Egan.
Sheikh Shahnawaz comments on his debut feature, BLUFF.
My father died 5 days after I finished writing the screenplay. In the film, you will see a photo of the protagonist as a child with his father. This is actually a photo of me and my father that I found during the week of his death. I was going to postpone making this film for at least 2 years if I had not found this photo. After I buried my father we started filming the very next month. I was driven to finish this film so that I could dedicate it in honour of his memory.
This is a deeply personal film for me. Not only because of having to deal with my father's death while making it but also because it was set in my hometown and deals with homelessness and the illicit trade of heroin which is a prevalent issue here. The film also revolves around the rising use of fentanyl, a lethal drug used to increase the potency of heroin which we are seeing involved in more drug-related deaths around the world than ever before as part of the opioid crisis.
I spent time with actual heroin users and drug dealers for research. The undercover policing tactics depicted in the film are based on real life experiences of actual undercover police agents that operated in this region. To elevate the well-explored tropes of the crime genre, I crafted a very intricate story through the use of a non-linear structure that I don’t think audiences have quite experienced like this before. Not to mention we also had to shoot the last 25% of this film during a global pandemic once lockdown measures had eased.
I made BLUFF completely guerrilla as a one man over the last 2 years for a budget of $2000. I was forced to make this film with only my own resources because as a 26 year old filmmaker, a child of 2 Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants, from the inner-city of Birmingham, nobody in the UK film industry would give me a mainstream opportunity. Inspired by the debut micro-budget films of Christopher Nolan, Damien Chazelle, Barry Jenkins, Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez and Darren Aronofsky, I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from making this film.
I hope this film entertains and informs audiences all around the world. Although my father will never get to watch my debut feature film, at least his memory has been immortalized through it.
BLUFF is coming soon to Digital Platforms
