Anubhav Sinha to produce anthology based on COVID-19 pandemic
Mumbai: Director Anubhav Sinha has collaborated with filmmakers Sudhir Mishra, Hansal Mehta, Ketan Mehta and Subhash Kapoor to back an anthology based on stories around the coronavirus pandemic.
To be produced under his banner, Benaras Mediaworks, the "Thappad" director said he thought of documenting the crisis after Sudhir's driver contracted COVID-19 and was unable to get a bed at hospital.
Subsequently, Anubhav said the loss of close friend and actor Irrfan Khan, who passed away on April 29, and the challenges of attending his last rites hit him harder.
"What better way to do it than different filmmakers looking at different things? Sudhir's father passed during COVID. We lost Irrfan and couldn't not even go to his funeral. Tigmanshu had to fight the cops to go and said 'Irrfan is my brother, I will go.'
"All these things were disturbing. I thought these should be recorded. I spoke to my friends who agreed to do this and that's how the idea behind it began to formalise," Anubhav said in a statement.
The 55-year-old director said the project offered an opportunity for all the filmmakers to team up for a "good collaboration".
"There's one story by Subhash, one by Hansal, one by Sudhir, one probably by Ketan. These are filmmakers that I believe that the so-called 'Bollywood' has largely ignored," he added.
Shedding light on each filmmaker's story, Anubhav said, while Hansal's story is "comic and quite tragic", Mishra's film is political.
"Subhash's is also political, but in a different way. I am still struggling with my story - I want to tell an atmospheric story, which is about fear. I live on the 20th floor and I can see a very large expanse of Mumbai from my window.
"It has suddenly started looking like a deserted, dead city. And Ketan is saying 'main dekh ke batata hoon' (I will tell you in a while).'"
The yet-to-be-titled anthology is scheduled to be released in 2021.
Anand Gandhi, best known for "Ship of Theseus", is also set to direct a pandemic-based film titled "Emergence".
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Congress using hijab issue to pacify minority anger, alleges Karnataka LoP R Ashoka
Bengaluru: Leader of Opposition in the Assembly R. Ashoka has accused the Congress government of using the hijab issue to placate what he described as discontent among minority voters after the Davanagere by-election.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Ashoka alleged that the state government, instead of addressing issues such as price rise, corruption, farmers’ distress and law and order, was attempting to retain its minority vote base by reviving the hijab issue.
Referring to the 2022 dress code introduced by the BJP government, which prohibited hijab in schools and colleges, Ashoka said the Karnataka High Court had upheld the policy and emphasised the importance of discipline in educational institutions.
He questioned the Congress government’s move to revisit the issue and asked whether setting aside the court-backed policy to benefit one community could be described as secularism.
Ashoka further alleged that while the government was willing to permit hijab, it continued to prohibit saffron shawls.
He accused the government of dividing students on religious lines rather than treating schools and colleges as spaces of equality.
Drawing a comparison with Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal, Ashoka claimed that excessive appeasement politics had harmed the state and warned that the Congress in Karnataka could face a similar political response.
He said voters in Karnataka would teach the Congress a lesson for what he termed “vote-bank politics” and for compromising constitutional and judicial principles.
