Bheed trailer: Anubhav Sinha revisits the horror of the lockdown, as Bhushan Kumar distances himself from film amid controversy

Bheed trailer: Director Anubhav Sinha's streak of helming socially conscious dramas continues with this Rajkummar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar-starrer, about the horrors of the early lockdown.

Bhumi Pednekar and Rajkummar Rao in a still from Bheed.

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The first full trailer for director Anubhav Sinha’s Bheed has been released amid a controversy that erupted after the teaser was unveiled last week. The film dramatises the events in the immediate aftermath of the first lockdown in 2020, and how it affected different strata of society. Presented in black and white, Bheed draws parallels to the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947 both in imagery, and more overtly, when it has a journalist character say this in as many words.

“Justice is always in the hands of the powerful. If the powerless served justice, justice would be different,” Rajkummar Rao’s cop character says somberly in the trailer, which opens with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the nation, in which he announced that a full lockdown would be enforced in a matter of hours. This left millions of migrant workers stranded in major cities. As the more privileged hunkered down in their houses, those without homes made treks to their home states on highways, only to be stopped at borders, and punished by the law enforcement.

Also read | Bheed teaser: Anubhav Sinha’s black-and-white film may remind you of Partition, but is on plight of migrants during Covid

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Visuals of the police beating migrants, and spraying them with disinfectant — both are incidents that actually happened — recall the demeaning treatment that was given to a certain section of the population, at a time when they were at their most vulnerable, and were relying on government support. On the flipside, the trailer shows us Dia Mirza’s character, who is also stranded away from home, but appears to be a more privileged person. Rao, on the other hand, appears to be playing an upstanding cop, who takes it upon himself to school a person for showing caste bias during the turbulent time. Pankaj Kapur appears as a bigot, who refuses help from Muslim characters because of what was said about the community during the Tablighi Jamat controversy.

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Director Anubhav Sinha is continuing his streak of directing socially conscious dramas, after Mulk, Article 15, Thappad, and Anek. After the controversy erupted around Bheed, it was rumoured that producer Bhushan Kumar had distanced himself from the project. This appears to be true. While T-Series has posted the trailer online, there is no mention of Bhushan Kumar or the studio in the trailer, or in the credits slate at the end.

Also starring Bhumi Pednekar, Ashutosh Rana, Pankaj Kapur, Kritika Kamra and Kumud Mishra, Bheed will be released in theatres on March 24.

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