The Sabarmati Divide

It’s not the film Ranjan Chandel made and he chose to step aside after the first cut of the movie upon which he could see The Sabarmati Report taking a direction he didn’t agree with. And he expected the lead actor Vikrant Massey to agree with him after he discussed it with him. But Massey clearly chose to ride the wave and seems delighted with the end result, writing an emotional post after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah watched the movie based on the Godhra train massacre that sparked the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002. But Chandel, the director of what was the original version of The Sabarmati Report, has won a lot of support from within the industry for standing up for his version of the truth. The producer Ektaa Kapoor of Balaji Telefilms came to him with the film after watching Grahan (2021) on Disney+ Hotstar, which dealt with the impact of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots on contemporary lives and politics. Chandel’s idea was to tell a sensitive story behind a controversial dateline, not an overtly political film which could end up as a propaganda tool. Once the film was out, his name was replaced in the credits by Dheeraj Sarna who reshot portions of the film. Massey, for his part, seems to have been happy to go along with the changes, confusing those who had only recently embraced him as an icon of liberal values given the multi-religious nature of his family.

Trouble over Dues

There is another producer-director battle that has occupied the Hindi film industry over the last few months. Producer Vashu Bhagnani has been fighting with Ali Abbas Zafar, the director of his flop film Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, accusing him of inflating the budget of the movie. The latest in a series of salvos is an FIR filed by the Mumbai police against Zafar, where Bhagnani has accused him of a fraud of `9 crore. This follows the director and his crew charging Bhagnani’s Pooja Entertainment for not paying their dues. What is most interesting is that the FIR states the budget of the film was `154 crore, which ballooned to `230 crore, excluding the top actors’ fees. Media reports had pegged the budget at `350 crore, which tells us exactly how much money was spent on the two stars, Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff. They were doing well when they were signed but had a series of flops by the time Bade Miyan Chote Miyan was released. The release also coincided with audience fatigue with the noisy action genre, and the rise of the family drama with Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal. The movie was able to make `111 crore at the box office worldwide, a huge disappointment. It doesn’t seem to have affected Zafar though, much to Bhagnani’s irritation. Zafar has also been reunited with YRF, the production house for which he directed Mere Brother ki Dulhan (2011), Gunday (2014), Sultan (2016) and Tiger Zinda Hai (2017).

Breakout Star

She is half Assamese and half Marwari and all star material. Arrchita Agarwaal was more than equal to the task of playing Prerna, the girlfriend of Manoj Bajpayee’s character Joy Bag in the upcoming ‘Despatch’. Agarwaal moved to Mumbai in 2011, attending college in the city (Jai Hind) and then taking classes at Anupam Kher’s acting school. But she moved back to Guwahati in 2020 during Covid-19 after it became too expensive to stay on in Mumbai without work. So when she returned to Mumbai for the audition for Kanu Behl’s ‘Despatch’, she was approaching it like her character Prerna, full of hope but also fear. That is the feeling Behl worked with, says Agarwaal, even as he told her repeatedly to not act, just be. She had to do a few intimate scenes with Bajpayee, and says they had established such camaraderie during the workshop that they would end up discussing Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings in between takes. And there would be many takes. “Kanu sir is never happy with just a few takes. He wants the best out of you, your most authentic self, no matter how much time it takes,” she says. As for the intimate scenes, she says: “Manoj sir is such a giving actor that I never felt uncomfortable. He’s great because his discpline beats his talent.” Agarwaal calls ‘Despatch’ therapy that she didn’t know she needed. “It is only now that I am recovering from the role,” she says. Agarwaal hopes when ‘Despatch’ is released it will get her more auditions. “Everyone here tells me kaam se kaam milta hai (you get work by doing work),” she says. Agarwaal has already shot some films in Assamese which are yet to be released.

Ali Abbas ZafarArrchita AgarwaalBollywoodcinemaRanjan Chandel