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Behind bars!

All set Madhur Bhandarkar with the cast of “Jail”

“When I went inside jails in Maharashtra, for research, I almost went into depression. For two days, I couldn’t come out of that state.” This is filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar recalling on phone from Macau the shooting days of his forthcoming Jail. At Macau, he has unveiled the first look of the film in the run-up to IIFA Awards being hosted there.

Madhur, with some coaxing, gives the storyline focussing on what it is not than what it is! He says, “The film is about a boy called Parag Dixit (Neil Nitin Mukesh) who works in a corporate office. He gets trapped in unfavourable circumstances and lands up in a jail. There he meets people from various places, some innocent, some guilty. In the process of his own struggle to get out of jail, he learns about their lives and pain, and how a jail administration works.”

Madhur has often been accused of making a docudrama of sorts in his penchant for exposing the truth. He refutes assertively, “Jail is not a documentary but a mirror to society. It talks about the difficult patches of life for undertrials. It has nothing to do with the pressures of law or a comment on the system. It is not a dark film.”

This two-time National Award winner adds that Jail has doses of humour too. “Among several under-trials Parag meets, some are comical who will make you laugh with their tongue-in-cheek dialogues and at the same time convey that even in adverse circumstances one can smile,” he says. Though there are rumours that the film is partly based on Sanjay Dutt’s jail days, Madhur denies it: “It has nothing to do with Sanjay Dutt or Sanjay Nanda, it is a fictional story based on a script.”

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