The second teaser of the upcoming political thriller series Freedom at Midnight was dropped by SonyLIV on Friday. The Nikhil Advani-directed series will show the rift between Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Arif Zakaria) and Mahatma Gandhi (Chirag Vohra) at the 1920 Nagpur session of the Congress and its fallout.
The two-minute-29-second-long teaser begins with a glimpse of the Nagpur session where Sarojini Naidu (RJ Malishka) is introduced as the speaker. “This session has been called so that the party can deliberate on Mahatma Gandhi's proposal for non-cooperation,” she says before Jinnah interrupts to say that Gandhi is taking the country down the wrong path.
This is met by waves of disagreement from the crowd. “You are scared. You are scared of sacrificing for the nation. Down with Jinnah,” they shout. Following his dissent with Gandhi, Jinnah is seen walking out of the Nagpur session to declare his resignation from the party.
The trailer follows Jinnah’s campaign for a separate nation for Muslims. However, his motivations for creating Pakistan are not well-received by many, including Jawaharlal Nehru (Sidhant Gupta), who thinks that it’s a “mad” idea.
Based on the eponymous book by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, Freedom at Midnight will chronicle the political events that took place during India’s year of independence. It begins with the appointment of British India’s last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, and ends with Gandhi’s assassination and funeral the following year.
Touted as ‘a riveting, emotional tale of an incident that altered the course of the nation’, Freedom at Midnight is co-produced by StudioNEXT, an independent business unit of Sony Pictures Networks India. It is slated to premiere in November on SonyLIV.
“The year 1947 has been etched in India's history as the year that shaped its fate. A riveting, emotional tale of an incident that altered the course of the nation, 'Freedom at Midnight' is an attempt to bring to Indians the whole truth about the events that led us to our freedom—the courage, and the hope instilled in people by the personages who gave us the new India. This is a story every Indian should know, and I feel honoured to be able to tell it along with my partners, Monisha Advani and Madhu Bhojwani, and the team of writers, along with StudioNEXT,” Advani said in a statement.
Advani had previously collaborated with SonyLIV for the drama series Rocket Boys, chronicling the lives of the Indian physicists, Homi J. Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, who carried out the country’s first nuclear test in 1974.
