Hansal Mehta slams FFI after ‘Laapataa Ladies’ misses Oscars shortlist
'Laapataa Ladies' was India's official entry for the Best International Feature category at the 2025 Oscars but did not make the shortlist.
There is a harrowing sequence in Hansal Mehta’s Omerta where the leading man Rajkummar Rao’s car was stopped at a check-post and he was called to step out by a burly policeman who wanted to know if he was a Muslim or married to a Muslim.
Mehta said he too had faced such cultural discrimination once.
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“It is the beard. There was a time when I used to keep a beard. My music guru Ghulam Mustafa Khan asked me not to keep a beard because it made me look like a Muslim. None of his sons was allowed by him to keep a beard as he didn’t want his children to be identified by their beard as Muslims. That experience stayed with me. I used it in ‘Omerta’,” Mehta said.
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“It’s a frightening situation where the young Muslim men would not want to keep a beard for the fear of religious identification whereas Hindus would also shun the beard for the same reason. The beard may eventually become a thing of the past,” he said.
Omerta with its hard-hitting chronicle on the evolution of a terrorist’s mind has opened poorly across the country.
“Thanks to the ongoing success of Avengers we were given very poor show timings. There was not a show that suited the conventional audience. Plus there is the ‘Adults’ censor certification. That automatically puts off a major chunk of the audience,” says Mehta.
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