We contemplated casting a transgender person – Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui director Abhishek Kapoor

Filmmaker Abhishek Kapoor is on cloud nine these days. His latest movie, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui has been winning plaudits from different parts of the country and has also earned him some high praise from the LGBTQ community. While the movie has been hailed for its sensitive treatment of transgender people, many have questioned why a transgender person was not cast in the movie instead of a cisgender woman like Vaani Kapoor. In an exclusive chat with Filmfare, Abhishek Kapoor answers.

“We did contemplate casting a transgender person for the role of Maanvi earlier but this is the first time we are doing it, nobody has done a film like this, in this country at least and for it to be understood and to create accessibility, I thought it important to cast a leading lady for the film. I was not sure which leading lady would do it because the higher they are in the star quotient, they are more insecure and worried they become about the stigmatisation that can come with it. Vaani, I felt, was most poised in her career to take that leap. When I sent her the script and the way she responded to it . . . she took to it immediately, she loved it but she was apprehensive about how we present it,” he says.

“This is not the last movie, this is the first movie of its kind that has been made and the kind of response and the kind of houses that this story has penetrated because of the kind of casting we’ve done . . . there is an understanding of the trans community and from hereon when you cast trans people for roles, I think it has opened doors, it has started conversations. I think the decision I took was the correct one because we have a higher purpose. Like when you compare it to the West, you have a transgender person who has just won a Golden Globe for a performance. I think we are still behind the West. In this movie, I think, the attempt has been to at least take some giant steps in that direction and maybe in the next couple of years, if we do make some more movies about issues like this and characters like that and we will cast transgender people in these roles. I think we will make up for this distance very soon,” he adds.