Mumbai: Director Dibakar Banerjee says he is leaving no stone unturned to release his shelved Netflix project “Tees”, a film he made for the audience that appreciated his directorial debut “Khosla Ka Ghosla”.
Starring Manisha Koirala, Huma Qureshi and Shashank Arora, the movie revolves around three generations of an Indian family.
Originally titled “Freedom”, “Tees” was announced by Netflix in 2020 but remains unreleased. It was screened at the 2024 Dharamshala International Film Festival.
Banerjee, who blazed a trail with his 2006 acclaimed comedy drama “Khosla Ka Ghosla”, said efforts are still on to release “Tees”.
“We are trying our best to get it seen and get it from somebody who can buy it off or take it from Netflix or find some other solution so that the film is seen by the audience of ‘Khosla Ka Ghosla’. I made this (film) for the ‘Khosla Ka Ghosla’ audience. It is a kind of a real initiation with that generational style,” the director told reporters here.
Banerjee believes the current landscape will make it increasingly challenging for new writers to assert their originality.
“Writers starting today will have a much harder time. We had a good time, we had a good beginning and we fortunately were at the end of an age where the creator was still the main focus of the job.
“Now, that focus of the creator is going away for reasons that we all know. A young writer in today’s day and age will find it much more difficult to find his or her true voice today than in the times we were in,” he added.
The director was speaking on the sidelines of the 7th edition of the Indian Screenwriters Conference (ISC) hosted by the Screenwriters Association of India (SWA).
Banerjee, also known for “Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!”, “Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!”, “Shanghai”, and “Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar”, said creators need to be driven about telling their stories.
“You have to have the want first. It depends on how hard you want and wanting is not wishing, wanting is wanting. After that, you may not get what you want, but first, the want has to be there.
“Now, if you don’t know how to want or how to unapologetically want something or desire something or the want to tell a certain kind of a story, then the act of doing will never come,” he added.
The filmmaker said there was a time when corporates entering the film industry led low-budget films to flourish.
“We enjoyed the time of young corporates getting into filmmaking and us not having to bank on an individual producer, black-market money or gangster money to make our films.
“We had these sorts of pockets of small, middle or low-budget films that we could make as the corporates were willing to throw (money) our way because they were experimenting, they were feeding the market up. That gave us the chance. Even today, there would be parts of the business that are looking for new voices, new ways of telling,” he said.
