Before Anubhav Sinha, this director worked on series about IC 814 hijack for 8 years, OTT giant shelved project to...
Vishal Bhardwaj was making a series for Amazon Prime Video on IC 814 hijacking incident, but the streaming platform shelved the project after its show Tandav landed in a huge controversy.
The mini series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack has been receiving critical acclaim since its release on Netflix last month. The show, based on the real events surrounding the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Flight 814 in December 1999, is directed by Anubhav Sinha. But before him, another filmmaker worked on the series on the same subject for 8 years, but his project was suddenly shelved by a leading OTT giant. The director and the streaming platform being talked about are Vishal Bhardwaj and Amazon Prime Video India.
In an interview with Mid-Day in 2023, the Haider director shared, "At one point I was working on IC814 hijack project. I worked on that for 7-8 years. I was making it for Amazon, but after Tandav, they pulled the plug saying the don’t want to do anything political. I don’t think it was political, the whole country was humiliated, it had got nothing to do with any political party. But they were so paranoid, they still are, that they didn’t want to touch anything political."
Starring Saif Ali Khan, Sunil Grover, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, and Dimple Kapadia among others, Tandav was a political thriller series released on Amazon Prime Video in 2021. The show faced several threats and FIRs for allegedly hurting the religious sentiments of Hindus. The makers had to issue an unconditional apology and make certain changes after the whole controversial episode.
Coming back to Sinha's show, IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack features Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Vijay Varma, Arvind Swamy, Kumud Mishra, Manoj Pahwa, Dia Mirza, Amrita Puri, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Aditya Srivastava, Kanwaljit Singh, Rajiv Thakur, and Patralekhaa in pivotal roles. The show had also courted controversy over the use of codenames 'Bhola' and 'Shankar' used by Muslim terrorists onboard the hijacked flight. Netflix India had to add a disclaimer with the real names of the terrorists in the beginning of all the six episodes.
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