IC 814: The Kandhar Hijack is streaming on Netflix.
Filmmaker Anubhav Sinha says that “you feel pain and sadness even if a single person doesn’t like what you have done.” The director, whose latest web show launched IC 814: The Kandahar hijacking It is making a huge impact among the audience and critics for uncovering a fateful chapter in our history when an Indian Airlines flight bound for Delhi was hijacked in 1999.
In an exclusive chat with ZoomSinha spoke candidly about making the Netflix show and how challenging it was compared to the film medium.
Excerpts from the interview:
In challenge of Making a web show after the movies
I don’t know! I’ve worked in television before. If there’s a challenge in this format, I found it 27 years ago. Because of the amount of material I had, we knew it wasn’t a movie. They offered it to me as a series and Netflix gave us free rein to decide how many episodes we wanted to make. The whole grammar of writing, pacing and editing is different. Every X number of minutes, you need to have a hook point because you’re letting the audience go, and then you have to get them to come back five or six times. That’s a challenge.
On the investigation and details involved at the field level
The original plot of the series was based on the book (Flight into fear by Captain Devi Sharan and Srinjoy Chowdhury) that followed what was happening inside the plane. But when I read it, I was intrigued by what was happening on the ground. I told the team that I wanted to rewrite it and bring out aspects that weren’t originally there. Then we did new research, took the story down the back roads where it hadn’t gone before. Those roads were very exciting to explore.
On the amount of cinematic freedom one can take in a research project of this kind
Sometimes there are documents available in the public domain, but we never read them or pay attention to them. They are not there as news or for public consumption, but as research material. Even here, many details about the incident were unknown and not available on the Internet. We met with people on the ground. Nothing was confidential, but they were not in the public domain. We spoke to people, to officials from that time.
Also focusing on other historical events that happened at that time.
We looked at it in the context of other events and what was the impact of those incidents on this kidnapping. Like Kargil, Pokhran or the coup in Pakistan, what impact did all this have?
About IC 814: The Kandahar Hijacking
The crime thriller drama has a notable cast of actors Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Arvind Swamy, Vijay Varma, Kumud Mishra, Manoj Pahwa, Dia Mirza, Aditya Srivastava, Amrita Puri, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Patralekhaa, Kanwaljit Singh, Anupam Tripathi, Yashpal Sharma, Sushant Singh, Rajiv Thakur and others.
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