Release trouble for two films

10 May 2014

There was double trouble this Friday for two of the releases. While Sunil Bohra's controversial bio-pic on porn writer Mastram could not be released in Mumbai and most other centers of Mumbai in the morning, Asshu Trikha's Koyelaanchal faced serious legal trouble when Jharkhand's notorious coal baron and politician Suryadeo Singh's family went to the Ranchi High Court claiming that Singh had been portrayed in a bad light by the film's makers.

Trikha, who rushed to Ranchi to hire local legal help to combat the last-minute crisis, says he will fight out the matter in court. "Nowhere in the film have we said that Vinod Khanna's character of Suryabhan Singh is based on Suryadeo Singh. It's the family's conjecture that we've made a film on Suryadeo Singh and that the character has been portrayed in a bad light." Trikha has hired the best legal help in Jharkhand to prevent his film from being banned.

Says the director, "Luckily for us, the Dhanbad court did not grant an injunction to the complainant. So we could release the film. But the matter is now in court and we're prepared to defend our film." Incidentally, Anurag Kashyap's Gangs Of Wasseypur also portrayed the coal mines of Dhanbad as dens of criminalization. In that film, Tigmanshu Dhulia had apparently played a character based on Suryadeo Singh.

Asshu Trikha says his script for Koyelaanchal was ready long before Gangs Of Wasseypur . "It's all destiny. I had my film scripted six months before the team of Wasseypur even started their research. But my producer suffered a huge personal tragedy. So our film lost time.

Gangs Of Wasseypur is now a proclaimed hit. So any comment made on it by me would be redundant. But I do hope I'm in a position to portray a truer picture of the coal mafia in the commercial mould. Rest is up to God." Sunil Bohra's Mastram got delayed because of the censor board. Explains Bohra, "We couldn't release in Mumbai and other places on time on Friday morning, but we managed to release from the 11 am show onwards. We got censor clearance too late, just 36 hours before the release. We missed our Friday morning deadline."