A day after the Supreme Court lifted the ban on the screening of the film in Bengal, the makers of the controversial Hindi film The Kerala Story made a stop in Calcutta on Friday to address the city’s media.

Director Sudipto Sen and actress Adah Sharma touched upon various issues relating to the subject of the film, including its sensitive content, potential repercussions if screened in the state and the controversy surrounding it since the day its teaser was released. Vipul Amrutlal Shah, producer of the film, was present virtually at the Q&A session held at JW Marriott Kolkata. Brushing off questions on the film being full of distorted and manipulated facts, Sudipto Sen urged everyone to watch the movie before judging it negatively. He expressed satisfaction at the Supreme Court’s verdict that the film be screened all over the country, with no change or objection to a single frame, scene or dialogue, but only with some “legal disclaimers” added to the opening credits.

Sen reiterated that the film was the product of eight years of research by his team and himself, where they collected and verified facts, spoke personally to survivors, victims and their families and then collated them in the form of a film script. He clarified that the film showed incidents that have actually taken place in the lives of real-life young girls in Kerala, some of who were lucky enough to have escaped alive from their ordeal and been able to narrate their horrifying tale. Adah Sharma also confirmed that she had personally met and interacted with girls whose stories she had portrayed on screen, and expressed sadness that their suffering, and of those who had met a worse fate, were being projected as false by a section of the people. Shah declared that he found it “strange” and “shocking” that West Bengal has continued to “defy” the verdict of the Supreme Court by refusing to screen the film. He criticised the decision to ban the film as a refusal to support the victims and also called it a ban on the rights and freedom of citizens to watch a film if they wished to do so.

Responding to a question, he said that as a film-maker and as a citizen, he would fully support any film that shows crimes against women of any religion. He added that his film was not against any religion but against terror groups only. He allayed fears of possible law and order problems resulting from viewing the film, by affirming that not a single untoward incident has happened anywhere else in the country where it has been running to packed houses for the last two weeks. Finally, the makers underlined the fact that the film intends to alert people about the threat of terrorists and wants to safeguard youngsters from being brainwashed into terrorism. “Do not divide us into binaries, we are film-makers,” Shah said.