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Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap said that he read the Cinematograph Act after experiencing difficulty with the censors early in his career. He has since learned to subvert rules, which is how he got away with his latest film, Kennedy. But many years ago, he said that he was too naive to understand how the industry works, and didn’t know that certain lines shouldn’t be crossed. His second feature film, Black Friday, was banned a day before release, after prints had already been sent out to theatres. Fearing the worst, he decided to smuggle a print of the film out of the country.
In a live chat at the Marrakech International Film Festival, the director looked back on his career and spoke about getting Black Friday off the ground using guerilla techniques. Black Friday even got into the Locarno Film Festival, but its release was cancelled at the last second. An enterprising theatre owner illegally sold off prints of the film, which led to it being pirated on DVDs. Anurag bought hundreds of the DVDs himself, and distributed them for free abroad. This, he said, is how the movie found its way to Danny Boyle, who has cited it as an inspiration for his Oscar-winning blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire.
Anurag said, “When the censor board banned my first film, I walked into the office. I was a kid. The censor board chief said, ‘What is cinema to you? Cinema means healthy entertainment. Your film is neither healthy nor entertaining’. As a kid, I was so confused. I saw the impact of Black Friday. One big critic said that it’s a tourism film for India, using terrorists. I had a friend, a history professor at Princeton. I took the print of the film, to leave it with him, because I was scared they’d burn the print. In India, in the ’70s, the government actually burned the print of a film called Kissa Kursi Ka. They destroyed all the negatives of it. I was very scared, so I took a whole print to put it in Princeton.”
A still from Black Friday.
He said that because the film was banned only a day before release, prints had already been sent out to theatres. “Some cinema owners sold the film to pirates, so the film got pirated. It became a rage in the piracy scene. I bought 200 copies of my own film’s pirated DVDs, and I went to the US and gave them away in video stores. In that journey, the film reached two very important people: Danny Boyle, and the Chief Justice of India.”
Boyle made it a point to cite Black Friday as an inspiration during the awards season in 2008, which brought it to the attention of the Chief Justice of India, who said that the film must be released. Black Friday eventually came out in 2007. During the seven years in which it was stuck in limbo, Anurag said that he started drinking heavily, which impacted his marriage, and his relationship with his daughter.
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