Burning the midnight`s oil, you work on a certain project with huge determination and a certain motive in mind. And just when you are about to present it to the world in the quest of receiving feedback for it, it has already been spilled out by some unknown sources even without your permission. The flood of conflicted emotions which would surge in such a situation is unimaginable.
The film creators in B-Town are certainly going through the same phase right now with a rising number of film leaks coming in the picture these days. The issue got specifically exploded after Udta Punjab platoon brought it into excessive limelight, thus giving this severe issue the deserved attention.
Udta Punjab, which dealt with social issue of drug menace in Punjab was in the spotlight for all wrong reasons since its trailer released. The extreme use of cuss words and boldness that the movie depicted had not gone too well with the Central Board Of Film Certification. Chairperson Pahlaj Nihalani mainly opposing it, the CBFC had suggested around 89 cuts in the movie which further reduced down to just 1 cut when the case was run in Bombay High Court. The movie was released just two days before its release, thus deviating all the blame points towards CBFC, who seemed to be against the movie from much before due to all political reasons. But, in a baffling development of events, a Delhi person named Dilip Kumar was held as culprit for uploading the film on torrent, who was later arrested by Cyber Crime Cell after investigation. The police squad is still working on the speculation of CBFC being involved in this act, mainly because the leaked copy had a ‘FOR CENSOR’ watermark.
Surprisingly, next in the row to leak online was Great Grand Masti, a movie by the same production house as Udta Punjab. The makers as well as the actors, who actually had to prepone the movie release, were quite enraged about it and revealed in a conference, “The copy that has been leaked online is the same copy that was submitted to the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT). This is an unprecedented leakage. After cyber cell investigation, it was found out that the sealed copy was sent to FCAT, then the seal was tampered and mixed with other films.” The Crime Cell arrested around 9 illegal traders from the capital city and around 355 DVDS of the movie were confiscated from them.
Even the most anticipated movies of the year like Kabali and Sultan were available to download few hours before their release in an ambiguous way which is popularly referred as ‘dark web’. These are not the only cases, film leaks have occurred in past too, but were not given much exposure. To name few, ‘Paa’, ‘Paanch’, ‘Tera Kya Hoga Johnny’, ‘Manjhi’, ‘Mohalla Assi’ are the films which had found themselves falling into the vicious trap of piracy.
When CBFC got involved into the blame-game, Nihalani made his stand clear by saying that, “The word censor copy is written by the producer only. It is from their side, we don’t do anything like that from our side. In fact, it is not even necessary to be written, but because it’s been a convention they have always been mentioning it. We get 2000 films for certification from Mumbai alone. Why would we be interested in doing this to two films?”
After witnessing the tribulations that the filmmakers have gone through, their contemporaries have now grown wary and are being extra vigilant about the piracy issue. The latest example being Dishoom team, which took initiative of building preventive measures to fight the issue. The copy of the movie was submitted in an encrypted DCP-KDM format instead of a DVD to CBFC.
It was really a great step by Dishoom crew which hopefully, gets followed by other film creatives too. If seeing through a sensible perspective, having the need to combat the piracy issue in itself is a great shame to our nation`s entertainment industry. It just emphasizes the lack of dignity that exists in our country when few insensible beings depict low cordiality and humbleness by not respecting other`s hard-work, creativity and piece of art. Such issues should not be downplayed anymore and strict actions need to be taken to eliminate those few who are trying to depreciate the face of entertainment field by playing foul games of movie leaks. Only then the talent and efforts of the creators can be preserved in their true form!
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