Vishal Bharwaj reveals Toronto Film Festival rejected Omkara, said it’s ‘not a good film’: ‘Same year, they selected Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, Kabul Express’

He said in Hindi, “We’ve made a lot of nonsense. All that dancing around trees and going to Switzerland that we did for an entire generation… But there’s a socio-political reason for that, too. We couldn’t afford to travel abroad, which is why our cinema was aspirational. I’m talking about commercial cinema, because Satyajit Ray was able to make a name for himself. But our mainstream cinema was never good enough to travel.”

Asked about his own sensibilities, and if he has ever felt that there is a ‘bias’ against mainstream Hindi cinema, the filmmaker said, “When I made Maqbool, I had no idea that it would travel internationally. The environment wasn’t conducive; a lot of people told me to remove the Shakespeare reference from the script because it would turn away financiers. The thinking was that Shakespeare is boring, literature is boring. And then it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where people applauded it.”

Vishal said that he never set out to earn these plaudits, but he approached Omkara with a different mindset. “In Omkara, I consciously did that. I made my own language. But the same Toronto International Film Festival didn’t select that film. They said it’s not a good film. I must still be having some email from them. And that year they selected Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna and Kabul Express. They didn’t select Omkara, which is fine.”

Released in 2004, Maqbool starred Tabu, Irrfan Khan, Pankaj Kapur, Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri. Omkara featured Saif Ali Khan, Ajay Devgn, Vivek Oberoi and others, while the third instalment of his trilogy, Haider, starred Shahid Kapoor and Tabu. The filmmaker is now gearing up for the release of his Netflix spy film Khufiya, which will be released next week.