Anurag
Kashyap made an impassioned appeal in his Facebook post yesterday – about
unlawfully downloading films.
While
he advocates ‘our right to download’, he also requests the ‘prospective’ downloaders
to wait till Saturday – to give the film produced by him a fair chance with its
theatrical release.
He
doesn’t appeal to the downloaders to desist from doing what is virtually
unstoppable, i.e., preventing a film from going viral on different websites,
including the content sharing ones.
He
just requests for them to wait till Saturday.
And
that is the normal mode any film’s online presence has. A film is usually
uploaded on websites on the next day of its release in theatres. Normally these
are bad prints as most of them are camera videos of the film taken while a film
is being played.
He
wants a grand opening for Udta Punjab’. And why not?
When
he says it is about ‘vested interests’, he is making a statement.
The
film faced undue controversy only because the assembly polls in Punjab are
within a year and drug menace, the burning issue of Punjab, is focus of the
film.
Allegations
of political interference may or may not be true. Now that the film is in
theatres, no one is going to dig more into this.
But
the way the controversy has shaped so far, it shows our escapist nature, and it
vouches for our obstructionist nature in letting the status quo flow in favor
of our escapist nature.
Now
that the film has got some solid publicity because of this controversy and has
won the battle to get onto theatre screens in time, a brilliant opening in
theatres will be a befitting reply to all those naysayers.
Whether
the film is for entertainment or whether it carries some socially poignant is
not the case. The Udta Punjab row has
come to epitomize the ‘freedom of expression Vs illogical censorship’ struggle
and if the filmmakers really have made a poignant film, as various reviews of
Udta Punjab suggest, the best way to show solidarity with them is to watch the
film in theatres.
And
that is what perhaps Anurag Kashyap has in mind.