Bollywood filmmaker Kundan Shah has said that his National Award-winning film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro may not be possible in ‘today’s atmosphere’.
The Indian Express reported on Thursday that the director plans to return his National Award and quoted him as saying, “It is because you see the darkness that is coming into the country. One has to take a stance before this darkness engulfs us completely.
Dibakar Banerjee, along with 11 other filmmakers, returned National Awards to offer support to the students of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and protest the ‘growing intolerance’ in the country.
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Anand Patwardhan, Dipankar Banerjee, Paresh Kamdar, Nishtha Jain, Kirti Nakhwa, Harshavardhan Kulkarni, Hari Nair, Rakesh Sharma, Indraneel Lahiri, Lipika Singh Darai, Vikrant Pawar, Rakesh Shukla and Prateek Vats returned their awards along with Dibakar.
“It is not about the Congress or the BJP. Both are the same. My serial Police Station got banned when the Congress was in power,” the filmmaker said. The filmmaker also told the newspaper that the Mahabharata sequence in the film, with references to Indira Gandhi and several other things, would never have been possible in today’s scenario.
He further added that a satirical film like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was released without any problem because it was produced by a government agency (NFDC). Kundan Shah also said that the reactions to Shah Rukh Khan’s statement on the growing intolerance and FTII row highlight the situation in the country.
Reacting to the developments, director R Balki said, “It’s a protest from the industry, saying that we don’t believe in getting an award from a government or a country that thinks in a particular way. I applaud them (the filmmakers) tremendously for doing this. The only thing is that I hope the government gets the point, and suitably amends its strategy without ridiculing the intent of these filmmakers.”