Sunday, August 8, 2010

'Peepli Live' explores an unseen troubled India

'Peepli Live' is a satiric comedy-drama that casts a light on the country's rural citizens. The film highlights the growing divide between rural and urban India, a problem that remains largely invisible to most city dwellers.Peepli Live' is a satiric comedy-drama that casts a light on the country's rural citizens. The film highlights the growing divide between rural and urban India, a problem that remains largely invisible to most city dwellers.

‘Peepli Live’ might be a film that changes the hard-and-fast-divide between Bollywood's exuberantly overstuffed musical melodramas and high-minded art-house fare.

Produced by Aamir Khan, 'Peepli Live' was written and directed by Anusha Rizvi as her first directorial venture, the film stars Omkar Das Manikpuri as well as Raghuvir Yadav, Nawazuddin Siddiqui along with a number of newcomers.

'Peepli Live’inspired by real-life contemporary events
The bizarre reality on which the film's plot turns is that the Indian government makes compensatory payments to suicidal farmers' surviving family members.

In the film, Natha (played by Omkar Das Manikpuri) and his marginally savvier brother Budhia (Raghubir Yadav) are despairing of losing their land over an unpaid government loan.

So they hatch a plan to cash in by having Natha kill himself. 'Peepli Live' conjures a rural morality tale about a none-too-bright young farmer who nearly loses everything, including his life.

‘Peepli Live’ is inspired by real-life contemporary events, the economic shakeup of India's agrarian society and a horrifying wave of suicides by poor Indian farmers.

According to government statistics cited in the film, 182,000 farmers took their own lives between 1997 and 2007.

Director Anusha Rizvi on ‘Peepli Live’
Rizvi, whose own extended family has deep rural roots, said it was the government's peculiar policy that fired her imagination to write the film. "We have compensation for the dead," she said, "but what about the living?"

"It's the kind of film where you're laughing and wondering, 'Should I be laughing?'" said Anusha Rizvi, who wrote "Peepli Live," her first feature film, and co-directed it with her historian husband, Mahmood Farooqui.

Aamir Khan said, "There were no really big stars, a lot of the actors are villagers themselves, and a lot of them are tribals, so they kind of gelled in quite well. A lot of them spoke the same dialect and all of that."

He further adds,"There's no cynicism. There's a lot of hope, there's a lot of color, there's a lot of vibrancy, and it’s a great emotional journey that you go on.”

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