Will Amitabh Bachchan’s 2019 sports biopic Jhund be shelved because #MeToo has now named its director Nagraj Manjule? That’s what Bollywood trade sources are asking. Mr. Bachchan is supposed to play football coach Vijay Barse of Nagpur who founded Slum Soccer, the organization that takes Indian kids for the Homeless World Cup every year.
This is a football tournament that brings together over 500 players representing more than 50 countries that have faced social marginalization. The 2018 Homeless World Cup is taking place in Mexico City from November 13 to 18. Barse’s Slum Soccer organizes a nationwide football tournament from which promising young Indian talent is selected for the Homeless World Cup every year.
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File photo of Amitabh Bachchan.[/caption]
For Jhund, in which Mr. Bachchan plays the coach who channelizes street kids to build a football team, a 45 days’ shoot was planned in Nagpur. He would meet the street kids and do rehearsals with them before the shoot. Nagraj wanted the look and feel to be as authentic as possible. “The language of the film would be best showcased in Nagpur hence I chose the lanes of that city,” he explained.
That was then, before Nagraj got called out by his ex-wife Sunita for domestic abuse, physical and mental torture. The director of the Marathi super-hit Sairat had also said that working with Mr. Bachchan would be a dream come true. “He has always been my favourite legend and there was nobody other than him who fit the role of Vijay Barse perfectly,” Nagraj had said.
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File photo of Nagraj Manjule and Big B.[/caption]
Jhund was road blocked earlier when the original producers backed out of their commitment. That’s when Bhushan Kumar and T Series stepped in. But now with #MeToo naming Nagraj, the fate of the film remains unclear. Bhushan had given marching orders to Subhash Kapoor, the director of his biopic Mogul, after the latter’s name came up in an old sexual harassment case. Will he do the same with Nagraj?
