Anubhav Sinha on Bheed controversy says I don’t want to disturb sanctity of my film

There’s a sanctity to his film and he would not like to disturb it, says Anubhav Sinha, sidestepping the controversy over the trailer of Bheed for drawing parallels between the lockdown and Partition.

The first trailer of the movie was pulled off and re-released with changes, including the omission of a speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a dialogue referencing Partition.

Of course, these changes are obvious. The trailer was off air for two days (and) the changes mentioned are correct. But that reason is the filmmaker’s business.

Bheed, a black and white film starring Rajkummar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar, is Sinha’s take on the mass migrant movement during the March 2020 lockdown in India. He termed the lockdown the trigger for the film.

Sometimes I get attracted by the headlines, or something that has been probably bothering me for sometime I don’t like being angry but I am angry towards who we have become and who we are becoming. Referring to the controversy over his film’s trailer, the director said audiences these days are provoked into talking about gossip surrounding a movie when all they should care about is whether they like it or not.

Those people who thought my film is anti-India, I love them for being Indians and I try to be better as an Indian myself, Don’t you criticise your mother? You criticise your mother, father, sister, but you love them dearly. Why do you criticise them? Because you want them to be better, you think they can be better.

I love my country and society so dearly, I think we should rise higher, we should do better. In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Sinha also asked audiences to ignore the brouhaha surrounding the movie, releasing on March 24.

Need one more help. Please don’t think about how it was censored, how it will be released, why the trailer was removed from T-series channel, why Bhushan’s (Kumar) name was removed… These are all the battles of the filmmaker. We are fighting, we will fight, he said.

The Ra.One filmmaker, whose second innings has seen him evolve into a socio-political filmmaker with hard-hitting dramas such as Mulk, Article 15, Thappad and Anek, said there are a lot of decisions that are taken for different reasons during the edit of a film.