Mumbai, March 1 (IANS) Director Anubhuti Kashyap, who is receiving a lot of positive response to her recently released streaming movie ‘Accused’, has shared how the story came into being.
The director spoke with IANS during the promotions of the film, and shared that one of the biggest factors that drive the story forward is how the the accusations of the sexual harassment on the lead character affect the relationship with her queer partner.
‘Accused’ follows the story of a woman, who has been alleged to have sexually harassed a victim. It stars Konkona Sen Sharma and Pratibha Ranta in the lead.
The director told IANS, “The core idea for the film came from Netflix about building a story around a woman accused of sexual harassment and that was just the base of it all. So everything else, we started to research and we were very surprised to find there are so many such cases where a woman has been accused of sexual harassment, including in India”.
She further mentioned, “We researched and then we started to place that character, but we kind of started writing a story which was around when such an accusation, how it affects an entire relationship, what it does to the person because the entire film is centered around the accused person and their relationships and people around them”.
“So that was really the starting point and we started evaluating, evolving from there and then we built, you know, other characters and how it works and everything. So it kind of emerged and organically got built around it”, she added.
Earlier, Anubhuti had shared the prerequisites that she had in mind to tell the story.
She told IANS, “The story, the subject was such that it always needed a certain lens, a certain empathetic approach towards it. It couldn’t have been sensationalized, is what we felt. And I didn’t see it somehow in that lens at all. So we’ve kept that conscious choice, the treatment while writing the script also. We wanted to tell incidents in the story, events that make people uncomfortable in parts, not the queer relationship, but a lot of other things that were happening in the core of the story. So that was one of the guidelines”.
‘Accused’ is available to stream on Netflix.
–IANS
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