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Debate over a Bollywood movie gripped both India and Bangladesh
Written byপান্থ রহমান রেজা (Pantha)
Translated byRezwan
Translation posted 27 January 2023 9:38 GMT
Read this post in বাংলা
Screenshot from the Official Trailer of the Bollywood movie “Faraaz” published on YouTube. Fair use.
The upcoming Indian thriller “Faraaz,” directed by Bollywood Filmmaker Hansal Mehta, is set to release on February 3, 2023. However, the movie trailer has already sparked controversy in Bangladesh before its release as it is based on a terrorist attack that took place in Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka, Bangladesh in July 2016. When the night-long siege ended after a military operation, Bangladeshis were shocked to learn that 20 hostages had died in the incident — including 17 foreigners, three locals, two police officers, five terrorists and two bakery staff.
The movie centres around the story of 20-year-old Faraaz Ayaaz Hossain, a Bangladeshi hostage who was among those killed in the attack. The story is inspired by the book “Holey Artisan: A journalistic investigation”, published in 2017 by Bangladeshi journalist Nuruzzaman Labu. However, the movie has caused controversy as the mothers of two victims claim that the victims’ families were not consulted before the movie was made and have raised questions about the accuracy of the plot, as it depicts one victim (Faraaz) as a hero.
The Bangladesh Army conducted an operation called ‘Operation Thunderbolt’ to rescue the hostages, however, a number of hostages were already killed by the terrorists before the operation could be executed. Image of Bangladesh Army in a Victory Day Parade in 2011 via Wikipedia by Zubair Bin Iqbal. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Who is Faraaz?
Faraaz Ayaaz Hossain was a student at Emory University in Georgia, USA, who was visiting his home country Bangladesh during summer vacation. On July 1, 2016, Faraaz went to the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka with his two foreign friends, Abinta Kabir, a Bangladeshi-American citizen and fellow Emory University student, and Indian national Tarishi Jain, who was also studying in the US.After the hostages were killed, some news articles depicted Faraaz as a hero of the Dhaka siege, claiming that terrorists at one point allowed him to leave as he was a Bangladeshi citizen and a Muslim, but he refused to leave his friends.
The poster of the movie “Faraaz”. Image via Wikipedia. Fair use.
Faraaz was the grandson of Latifur Rahman, chairman of Transcom Limited, one of the big industrial conglomerates in Bangladesh. Some commentators believe that the power and influence of this conglomerate (which also owns newspapers and TV channels) contributed to the glorification of Faraaz.
Although the movie revolves around Faraaz's heroism and his willingness to sacrifice himself for his friends, this claim has also been dismissed by many, including Bangladeshi crime reporter Nuruzzaman Labu, who covered the Holey Artisan incident live as a news reporter and later wrote the investigative book titled “Holey Artisan: A journalistic investigation” from which the production company also took information for the movie. He wrote on Facebook about the movie:
Ruba Ahmed, the mother of one of the victims, Abinta Kabir, also expressed scepticism about the claims of Faraaz's heroism. On January 19, 2023, she stated during a press conference in Dhaka:
Former Ambassador MG Shahidul Haque tweeted:
The legal battle
The mothers of Abinta Kabir and Tarishi Jain, two friends of Faraaz, made an appeal to the Delhi High Court last year to prevent the release of the movie. In their lawsuit, they argued that the movie misrepresented the facts and violated the privacy of their daughters. They claimed that their “right to be left alone” outweighed the filmmakers’ right to commercially exploit the incident. However, the filmmaker argued that the information on the incident was already in the public domain and that a disclaimer states that “Faraaz” is a fictional work inspired by a true incident.
On October 15, 2022, the Delhi High Court declined to grant an interim stay to prevent the release of “Faraaz.”
Later, the mother appealed the decision, and on January 17, 2023, the Delhi High Court ordered Filmmaker Hansal Mehta and the two mothers to meet and attempt to resolve the issue.
The ongoing legal dispute has sparked an unprecedented legal debate in India about whether the depiction of a terrorist attack infringes on the victims’ right to privacy and if that right extends to the victim's family members in their absence. The next court hearing is scheduled for February 1, 2023, two days before the planned release of the movie.
Writer and researcher Hasan Morshed suggested that if the truth can be distorted, it undermines the rights of others involved in the incident, in a post on Facebook:
Artist freedom and the censor board
The issue of artist freedom and censorship is also at play in the controversy surrounding the portrayal of the Holey Artisan incident. A Bangladeshi film, “Shonibarer Bikel,” was also inspired by the events of July 1, 2016, but it faced a four-year delay in its release. The movie was produced by Abdul Aziz, Mostafa Sarwar Farooqi and Shyam Sundar Dey and first premiered in 2019 at the 41st Moscow international film festival. In the same year, A 15-member censor board ruled the film unfit for screening in Bangladesh, citing issues with the portrayal of security forces’ roles in the Holey Artisan incident and the omission of police casualties. On January 21, 2023, the appeal committee of the Board agreed to release the film with some conditions.Journalist and fiction writer Binoy Dutta argued that artists should have the freedom to express themselves and create content based on real-life events.
This is not the first time a film has been blocked by the censor board in Bangladesh. Before this, Humayun Ahmed's “Aguner Parashmani“, (1994); Reza Ghatak's “Haribol“, (2019); the first film in the Chakma language “Mor Thengari” (My Bicycle), 2015; and Ananya Mamun's ‘Makeup’ were either briefly or fully blocked by the censor board.
