Bollywood divided on capturing 26/11 on reels

A year after the country’s entertainment capital witnessed one of the worst-ever terror attacks, Bollywood is still divided on whether it is the right time to bring alive the 26/11 carnage on the silver screen.Though around 10 film titles revolving around the tragedy have been registered and a couple of low-budget movies are ready for release, mainstream filmmakers have chosen to stay away from the issue after noted director Ram Gopal Varma’s ‘terror tourism’ episode, which got him much flak and cost the then Maharashtra CM Vilasrao Deshmukh his chair. Filmmaker Rensil D’silva, whose debut movie Kurbaan recently hit the screens, feels it is too early to explore the subject as the audience is not ready for it.”Not anytime soon. The wounds are yet to heal. We should wait for at least 3-4 years before embarking on a film on the subject.

Hollywood made films on the 9/11 terror attacks but these films were made just four years ago, a few years after the tragedy,” said D’silva, who directed the Saif Ali Khan- Kareena Kapoor starrer with terror in the backdrop.”Besides whatever details we have is just about 40 per cent of the facts of the attacks, barely enough to portray a tragedy of such magnitude as 26/11,” he said.However, industry’s bad man Gulshan Grover does not subscribe to D’silva’s views and says “there is nothing like a proper time to tell a story. There are many people around the world who are curious to know what happened on 26/11.”"As long as the story is authentic and sincere and the film fraternity is not looking to just commercially exploit the subject, I see no problem why a movie (on the subject) should not be made,” he asserts.

Actor-filmmaker Anant Mahadevan, who is ready with his next release Red alert, with a naxal setting, reasons that the Indian film industry does not have enough means to deal with the subject, which is why it is not willing to take risk.”It is not possible to recreate the Taj Hotel..where would you create the inferno? Where is the budget? Besides, what we have is only a superficial idea of what happened and no one has tried to go down deep into the issue. Inadequacy of research and budget have restrained the industry,” he said.”What we can do is to take one particular human angle.. for instance the case of the fisherwoman (Anita Uddaiya), who claimed to have seen the terrorists landing on the sea shore and was allegedly whisked off by the FBI, and other stories of human courage and give them an investigative touch,” he said.”Did she know too much? Is she hiding something?

Does FBI know something which it is hiding from us? that may be a story I would like to explore,” the director of Dil Vil Pyar Vyar and Dil Mange More said.