The Siddis, a community unrepresented in Indian cinema, is under the spotlight in Rhythm of Dammam, an exceptionally evocative, visually arresting film written and directed by Kerala-born, New York-based Jayan Cherian.

The film premiered this week at the 55th International Film Festival of India in Goa. It is now headed to the International Competition line-up of the upcoming 29th International Film Festival of Kerala.

Rhythm of Dammam – the title alludes to a musical tradition germane to the Siddi way of life – shines a light on the plight of the marginalised Afro-Indian tribe that languishes at the bottom of India’s social hierarchy.

In 2013, Cherian’s debut feature, Papilio Buddha, probed systemic and physical violence perpetrated against Dalits, women and the environment. Three years later, he made Ka Bodyscapes, a film about three rebellious millennials who defy notions of gender and sexuality perpetuated to a change-averse society.

Rhythm of Dammam isn’t quite as subversive but, like the filmmaker’s previous films, is political to the core. Using relatively muted means, it examines the marginalization of the Siddis who have suffered centuries of oppression.

Cherian’s script, which draws liberally from his extensive documentation of the lives of the forest dwellers, alludes tangentially yet unambiguously to the obliteration of the endangered minority’s history, culture and language.

Rhythm of Dammam, lit and lensed by Sabin Uralikandy, has the tone and texture of a documentary. However, the seeds of an ethnographic film embedded in the film are grafted upon a full-blown fictional structure for the purpose of elucidation. The strategy works wonderfully well.

The film’s protagonist, a 12-year-old Siddi boy, Jayaram (Chinmaya Siddi), struggles to come to terms with the demise of his grandfather Rama Bantu Siddi (Parashuram Siddi). His anguish, bewilderment and fears are aggravated by the ways in which the adults around him react to the death and its aftermath.

His alcoholic, debt-ridden father Bhaskara (Prashant Siddi, widely known to Kannada movie fans), bickers endlessly with his younger brother Ganapathi (Nagaraj Siddi). The two men have their eyes on what the deceased man is believed to have bequeathed to them.

Their home and the land on which it stands are in danger of being seized by the upper-caste landlord to whom Bhaskara owes a few thousand rupees. He hopes to avert the eventuality with the inherited money. But the box Bhaskara digs out of a corner of the house contains trinkets of little material worth.

To Jayaram, however, the heirloom, no matter how worthless, become a ready, if unsettling, conduit to the hoary roots of his brutally exploited tribe who were brought to India as slaves by Portuguese and Arab traders and thereafter left to deal with continuing subjugation and persecution over many centuries.

The principal actors in Rhythm of Dammam, set in Yellapur in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, where a large percentage of Hindu Siddis are concentrated, are all non-actors from the community. The actors cast as non-tribals, all tertiary characters – the landlord, a doctor, or an instructor in a tribal boys’ hostel – are (or look like) real people.

Cherian sets the actors free to improvise their performances, songs and dances. Many extended shots with a static camera provide naturalistic, unmediated frames to create a tangible context for the sufferings of the Siddis even as Jayaram’s visions of his forebears transport the boy, and the audience, to a surreal, often disturbing, zone.

The assimilation of the Siddis we see in the film is complete, so, ironically, is their alienation from mainstream India. They speak a creole of Konkani, which is the language of their religious chants. Their gods and rituals are Hindu. But their spirit – embodied in the white-robed figure of the grandfather Jayaram sees and touches in his dreams/nightmares – is driven by a yearning for an identity.

Politics makes its emphatic way into Rhythm of Dammam. The songs and dances of the Siddis, performed to the accompaniment of the dual-headed cylinder drums called dammam, which also gives their principal musical tradition its name.

The dances are studiedly unchoreographed. The actors work themselves up into a frenzy and create their own moves once they get into the swing of the music. It is marked by a distinctly Afro accent.

Haunted by what his grandpa is trying to tell him, Jayaram turns febrile, teeters on the edge of delirium, and is branded a problem child in need of healing. A fretful mother, an aunt possessed by Goddess Yellamma, a community shaman and a doctor who prescribes psychiatric treatment suggest ways to help the boy tide over his problem.

Jayaram’s fragile state of mind reflects the reality of a community that dangles between a past they have all but forgotten and a present that they would rather put behind them.

A young man raps angrily, bemoaning the community’s loss of the soul, language and identity. The languages Jayaram speaks serve to denote how far removed the Siddis of India are from their Bantu roots.

In Jayaram’s school, the medium of instruction is Kannada. The teacher, a non-Siddi, makes the students recite a patriotic pledge before testing the students’ knowledge of the world’s seven continents. Jayaram is lost in thought.

The teacher ridicules him. He asks: Where do you live, Jayaram? Please, the boy replies. That is the name of his village. Jayaram’s ancestry, straddling two continents, is shrouded in a dense haze. For him, the assertion of specificity of location stems from a desire to belong.

When Jayaram is admitted to a hostel, the mass prayer there, rendered in Sanskrit, is overtly religious. Every step that he moves away from his moorings is indicative of the blows that his ancestors have faced.

Amid the politics that Rhythm of Dammam espouses, Cherian sprinkles the narrative with pure magic seen through the pristine eyes of a pre-teen boy. The tender, poetic imagery suggests a despairing search for stability amid a frightening absence of certitude.

Rhythm of Dammam trains its empathetic spotlight on the troubles of one community. But not only does the film give voice to the voiceless, it also speaks to all those who find themselves painted into a corner by history.

Hitting all the right notes, Rhythm of Dammam laments the undermining of a civilisational tapestry that thrives on diversity.