The Next Face

In Mumbai, every election has a story. This one has been carefully blurred.

Nandu, a cameraman at the struggling People First News, pays his rent photographing other people's secrets in a seedy budget hotel. One night he stumbles onto something bigger: a secret operation moving cash through Mumbai before the state election, protected by politicians, police officers and people whose faces never appear clearly on camera.

He sends the footage anonymously to Anuja Menon, a reporter at the far bigger NationLine, and it becomes the story every channel wants: The Vote Market. But Nandu knows which faces are worth money. He blurred them in what he sent and kept the original footage for himself.

For ACP Shekhar Sawant, the footage reopens a question he has lived with for two years: was his friend's death really an accident?

Then a riot in East Mumbai buries the story. The man directing the operation has never contested an election, and nobody would think to look at him. Nandu is about to name his price.

The Next Face is a sharp, darkly comic Mumbai political thriller about media, cash and the clean images power is built on.

The faces change. The money doesn't.