Cinema chronicles the reality of the world with a tinge of drama. Filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar, who is known to scope the truth behind the curtain to make his films, retold the dilemmas of the lockdown from different perspectives with India Lockdown. The ZEE5 film, starring Prateik Babbar, Sai Tamhankar, Shweta Basu Prasad, and Aahana Kumra was a challenge, claims the director. “Before I zeroed down on the four stories, I had 12 different ideas. At one point, I thought of making it into a web series, but [I believed] a lot of people might have thought of the same thing. Making a web series is like making three films together. It was difficult to pick up the right kind of strata of society. We have sex workers, migrant workers, an old man who wanted to meet his daughter, and a female pilot confided to her house. I thought these people would be able to correctly represent the society.”
Madhur Bhandarkar
Written by Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah, the COVID-19 inspired film was Bhandarkar’s way to “document the reality” of the pandemic. Ask him why, and he says, “As a filmmaker, I wanted to document everything as it happened, especially in the first 20 days of the lockdown. How people struggled, got anxious, and were clueless about how it all happened. The best medium to [narrate the story] was a film.”
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