Bastar teaser: Adah Sharma is willing to gun down ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ in Vipul Amrutlal Shah’s latest propaganda movie

The teaser ends with a provocative statement. Neerja declares that she is willing to gun down the ‘pseudo-intellectuals’, and is willing to be hanged for it. If the success of The Kerala Story proved one thing, it’s that there is a strong audience for this sort of ‘cinema’. The movie made over Rs 300 crore worldwide despite all the controversy, but was largely ignored by the mainstream. It sits at a 14% approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, which is about as low as things can get.

Vipul Amrutlal Shah has gone on to defend the misinformation peddled in the movie, and will probably repeat the strategy when Bastar is inevitably met with pushback as well. The filmmakers’ disdain for not just JNU, but for education of all kind is clear from the press release provided for the Bastar teaser. It misspells ‘martyrs’ as ‘martiers’ and the word ‘pseudo’ as ‘psudo’, and promises that truths ‘will be unfolded’ in the film. The movie will be released in theatres on March 15, and one can only wonder if it’ll suffer the same fate as Vivek Agnihotri’s Kashmir Files follow-up, The Vaccine War.