Mid Day to make film on 93 Mumbai blasts

Mid Day to make film on 93 Mumbai blasts
By: Mayank Shekhar
July 24, 2003
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Nearly 200 characters. A script that’s taken one-and-a-half years to put together. A mammoth project shot over 65 days on locations ranging from Mumbai to Dubai. And the first Bollywood reel interpretation of an event of contemporary times, told not through overt references, but as the prosecutors perceived them.

Anurag Kashyap’s film adaptation of the “investigations behind the 1993 Bombay blasts,” based on S Hussain Zaidi’s journalistic compendium Black Friday, is to hit the floors in October this year.




Mid Day Special Correspondent S Hussain Zaidi speaks on the book Black Friday

Buy 'Black Friday'

“We will formally begin pre-production on August 1 but the research and noiseless background work has been on for a long time,” informs Kashyap, who debuted with the yet-unreleased Paanch and is the pen behind films like Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya and Shool.

The ambitious Rs 8 crore venture has been initiated by Mid Day Multimedia Ltd.


‘Film won’t use aliases for Dawood and Co’

Director Anurag Kashyap is set to make a movie based on Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts, written by Mid Day Assistant Editor S Hussain Zaidi.

“Mid Day is about news and this city. And the Bombay blasts was one of the most important events that reshaped the socio-political fabric of Mumbai, hence our interest,” producer Arindam Mitra explains the media company’s maiden foray into cinema business.

Black Friday, so far the working title of the film with background score rendered by composer Sandeep Chowta, does not touch on the ongoing blast trial. It pieces together chargesheets filed in the investigation and newspaper reports as a backbone to the film’s research. “We are not proving what is not proved, and unlike a conventional flick, there are no heroes or villains in the plot,” says Kashyap.



The 1993 Mumbai Bomb Blasts trial

The 1993 Mumbai Bomb Blasts - Complete Coverage

The writer-director who admits to having spent less than a week to write films like Gulaal and Allwyn Kalicharan (ventures presently in cold storage), says the screenplay for Black Friday has taken by far the longest. This is natural, considering the film deals with a sensitive event that touched millions of Mumbai residents and supports a controversial backdrop of religious divide.

Also, since the “true-to-life film” does not hide behind a veil of fiction and consequent cinematic liberties, characters in the plot like Dawood Ibrahim or Tiger Memon are referred to by their actual names than customary pseudonyms. “We’re a democracy and we don’t use it. I can’t live in fear, as long as I’ve been objective and honest with an account,” justifies Kashyap as he spells out the differences between Mid Day assistant editor Zaidi’s Penguin-published book and the film.

“It’s very close to Zaidi’s text but the structure is slightly different. It tells the story through two main characters Rakesh Maria (key police point man in the blast investigations), played by A K Menon, and Badshah Khan (an accused, under police custody) played by Irrfan Khan.

"Ultimately there is no point telling 10,000 disparate stories, which the audience cannot connect with or making a two-and-a-half-hours documentary that nobody is expected to watch. The attempt is to make the event larger than the image in a popular format. There is no jingoism and no over-dramatisation, as the subject itself is dramatic and there is a great level of responsibility attached to the project,” argues the director.

The film is expected to hit the theatres tentatively in March next year.