Shyam Benegal calls The Kashmir Files 'earnest film', but says director Vivek Agnihotri can't have objectivity

Shyam Benegal

Veteran director Shyam Benegal, also one of the most political filmmakers in the country, says making a film on the country's socio-political history requires unwavering sense of objectivity.

From Ankur (1974), Nishant (1975), Bhumika (1977), Mandi (1983) to Sardari Begum (1996), Zubeidaa (2001) and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005), Benegal's five-decade long filmography stands as an observer as well as a challenger to the Indian society and issues plaguing it.

Benegal is now gearing up for the release of his next, Mujib: The Making of a Nation, the biopic of the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In a group interaction on the sidelines of the film's screening at the National Museum of Indian Cinema here, Benegal was cited examples of films like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story, and asked the key to attaining neutrality while developing political films.

According to him, cognisance of one's responsibility to history is of prime importance.

"It depends on how close you are to the (subject), whether you can be objective enough or not. Now, The Kashmir Files is a very earnest film but he (Agnihotri) is too close to the subject because he is a Kashmiri himself. He is too close. He cannot have the objectivity that is necessary. It is easy to take sides, you cannot look at it objectively, not everybody can, even I cannot, but the fact is that we have to see to it that we are as objective as possible because that is something that you are responsible to history, not to anybody else," Benegal said.

'Mujib', an India-Bangladesh joint production, releases in India this Friday.