Shekhar Kapur questions 'censoring' of 'Padmavati'

Acclaimed director Shekhar Kapur on Sunday questioned the 'censoring' of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Padmavati", while arguing that while Bhansali was a good filmmaker, he had never made political films.

"I know the filmmaker, I know the film and you know the film. The intention of the filmmaker was not to create controversy. He is a great filmmaker, but he has never been a political filmmaker," he said at a Masterclass on the sidelines of the ongoing 48th International Film Festival of India.

"There are fractured lines in our society which are very obvious because India, as a society is in an absolute and desperate flux," Kapur said, while trying to lay out the context the controversy surrounding "Padmavati".

"All the fractured lines, which were drawn once, are breaking. And in the breaking of those lines, there are fractures. And so the politics that has risen around the film, not in the film, why censor the poor filmmaker. It was not his intention," he said.

Kapur claimed that he was not against censorship and freedom of speech was not complete in every sense of the word, but also recalled that he himself had to fight a long-drawn legal battle to get his film "Bandit Queen" released.

--IANS

maya/vd