NEW DELHI, DEC 3: When LA-based producer Deepak Nayar asked adman-director Mahesh Mathai to work out a film on the Bhopal gas tragedy, it seemed like a ``great subject'' to the director. Until he went to the city last year, and experienced a few truths. One, that the lethal gases which snubbed out the lives of over 8,000 people one night 15 years ago, continue their tentacle-hold on the survivors (the total death toll stands at 16,000 today).``It's a living story,'' shudders Mathai, 41, whose debut feature film, Bhopal Express, premiered at the Siri Fort Auditorium on Thursday on the 15th anniversary of the disaster. Shock, anger and a growing sense of horror are what Mathai obviously felt on his trip to Bhopal, because his one hour, forty-five minute film is steeped in them. Shot in Hyderabad in just 35 days, the film was introduced by Nayar (who's worked with big Hollywood names like Jane Campion and Wim Wenders), and inaugurated by Information and Broadcasting Minister, Arun Jaitley.StarringNaseeruddin Shah, model Nethra Raghuraman and stage actor Kaykay, along with Zeenat Aman in a cameo role, the film spans 30 hours in the life of Verma (Kaykay), an assistant supervisor in the Union Carbide factory. ``It's a very realistic film, but the balance of pain and hope are what make it a must-see,'' says Raghuraman, who plays Kaykay's wife in the film.As the horrific drama unfolds, Kaykay, after dropping his wife off at the station, heads to a local bar with friend Bashir (played with consummate skill by Shah). Meanwhile, the gas starts to leak in the badly managed plant, slowly choking a sleeping population.Mathai, who's behind such famous ad campaigns as Eveready ``Give me Red'', is constantly switching settings in the film: even as the chemical catastrophe decimates at one end, Union Carbide executives, ensconced in their plush First World office, struggle to find a way out of the mess without tainting their image. After all, they ask, what's the value of a `few' thousand Third Worldlives?Though Mathai makes concessions to popularity in the use of melodrama and music there is an original soundtrack as well - Bhopal Express, which is being screened at the Berlin Film Festival and releases in India next week, works. Because it's a story honestly told.
