New Delhi, Dec 21, 2004
Konkona Sen Sharma of the national award fame and dusky looks, slips
easily into the role of Kaju, the 21- year old NRI who returns to India
to seek her roots.
Her search takes her back to the slums of Old Delhi, 18 years back
in time as she comes face to face with the harsh realities of the 1984
riots.
The movie begins with Kaju returning from Los Angeles only to team
up with a friend Kabir in order to find some information of her real
parents and her life before she was adopted by a Bengali family at the
age of three. The movie ends as Kaju realises that she is Sikh girl
whose birth name was Amu, and that her entire family had been wiped
out in the riots.
Through Kaju's eyes one gets to see afresh the brutality and the horror
of the perpetrated genocide. "Amu,' which is also the name of the
book written by the director Shonali Bose, raises many questions, the
least of which is why when 20,000 people were killed in broad day light,
no one has been held answerable till today.
For the Los Angeles based director, who witnessed the massacre and
helped rehabilitate victims as she volunteered in the camps where they
were kept following the riots, the story is something that can not be
allowed to die down.
She says that it has been burden going through each day knowing that
justice for the crimes, that she saw as a young student of Miranda House
in Delhi University, has not yet been done.
"It was a film I had to make, it was something that had to be
told. I don't call them riots, I call it state sponsored terrorism,
as it was sponsored by the government. What happened in 1984, what happened
in Gujarat and what the US carried out in Iraq is all state sponsored
terrorism according to me," says Shonali.
Konkona on the other hand hopes that it would make the younger generation
sit up and think so that they can take matters in their own hands.
"After Mr and Mrs Aiyer, this is the second film I have done on
a social issue and I hope that it will make the younger generation more
sensitive to these issues," says the actress, who is eagerly awaiting
the release of her next movie 'Page 3' which she says would be her first
Hindi movie and the most mainstream movie she has done till now.
"Amu' also marks the birth of a new screen mom as activist Brinda
Karat, who vehemently raised her voice against the riots in 1984 and
now heads the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), plays
the role of Kaju's foster mother with ilan.
The movie also follows in the footsteps of other socially relevant
movies like Mr and Mrs Aiyer, which do not fall in any of the known
movie genres of commercial or art films and cannot be called documentaries
either.
Shonali would like to describe these kind of movies as simply 'thinking
movies.' "Perhaps we are starting a new trend which will become
the future of tomorrow. These movies are not made for commercial success
or because we want them to reach out to the art movie watching section
of theatre goers, these movies are made simply because we want the people
to start thinking about the issues like justice and violence" she
concludes on a cogent note. (ANI)