Ziddh is the Hindi word for stubbornness — but not the petty kind. This is the stubbornness that keeps a young athlete standing after he should have fallen. The refusal to bow to a world that prefers him compliant, respectable, contained.
The film is made by someone who knows that stubbornness intimately: Aryaman Adik, a former Indian junior national squash player, now a filmmaker who turned his own unspoken battles into cinema.
As squash hurtles toward its long-awaited debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Ziddh arrives on that Oylmpic flame – reminding us that before medals, before podiums, there is the inner war. The one no camera usually sees.
Plenty of directors have attempted sports films. Very few have lived the sport they’re filming. Almost none have lived squash.
And that is the first thing you feel in Ziddh: someone who has been inside the glass box, who has tasted the claustrophobia and the silence, who knows the peculiar violence of a rally that lasts too long.
Squash Player Mag reviews Ziddh: The Squash Film That Bleeds
