Shekhar Kapur took to X on Tuesday to slam the OTT platform Amazon Prime Video for cutting his 1994 film Bandit Queen ‘beyond recognition’. The veteran director asked if they would cut American filmmaker Christopher Nolan's film in a similar way without permission.
Shekhar had earlier shared his reaction on the social media platform after watching the recent Netflix show Adolescence, praising it for defying the three-act structure. To this, filmmaker Sudhir Mishra responded saying, “Nobody will let us do something like that. One should do it as an independent film. Something of our own which is wanders, then stops, digs and goes where the smell takes us.”
Shekhar shared his response and wrote, “I wonder if OTT platforms would let me make Bandit Queen the way I made it years ago. Bandit Queen on Amazon Prime is unrecognizable from my film. Someone has cut it beyond recognition. And yet it carries my name as Director. And no one asked me! Are we lesser beings than Western Directors? Would they have the guts to cut a Chris Nolan film without his permission?”
After this, even Hansal Mehta joined the discussion and wrote, “That is the point I’ve been trying to make. Are we here to foster superior storytelling or to produce cattle-feed? Leave the good stories, the innovative storytelling, the silences, the slow burn, the experiments, the audacity, the budgets to the superior minds from the west. Welcome back to the days of colonisation.”
Shekhar’s Bandit Queen is a biographical action film based on the life of Phoolan Devi and stars Seema Biswas, Nirmal Pandey, Gajraj Rao, Saurabh Shukla and Manoj Bajpayee in pivotal roles. It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi and was also selected as India’s official entry to the Academy Awards in 1995 but was not nominated.