Sheikh Shahnawaz’s first ever directorial feature, Bluff, will be making its way onto popular streaming service Amazon Prime later this month (April, 2022).
The upcoming movie stars Gurj Gill, Jason Adam, Nisaro Karim (24 Little Hours), James Jaysen Bryhan (Shadow and Bone) and Joe Egan (Sherlock Holmes), plus music by Savfk.
Bluff follows Detective Sergent Daniel Miller (Gill), who has been suspended from the London Metropolitan Police in order to be secretly deployed to a small English town. He will embark on a clandestine mission to reveal Britain’s major suppliers of both crack cocaine and heroin.
Miller goes undercover as a heroin addict, and must manipulate an unknowing junkie into working with him. This will allow Miller to infiltrate the drug network, and work his way up the supply chain.
The line between his job and being a criminal becomes painfully blurry, as the Detective Sergent’s investigation becomes more and more dangerous the closer he gets to the truth, and finding out the source of the drug trafficker.
Writer, producer and director of Bluff, Shahnawaz, stated "My father died five days after I finished writing the screenplay.
“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 director goes on to say that "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.”
The trailer for Bluff shows Miller’s journey as he goes from cop to criminal in order to save the streets from an overload of drugs.
Lives are threatened and truths may come out as Miller fights not only for the drugs to be cleaned from the streets, but for his own life.
Bluff will land on Amazon Prime on April 28th, 2022.
Written by Melissa, who you can follow on Twitter @melissajournal
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