Addressing the controversial poster for Leena Manimekalai's film Kaali, Vivek Agnihotri has poked fun at her. In an interview, Leena had defended the poster, which featured the Hindu deity Kaali puffing on a cigarette. Vivek responded with a scathing remark, urging the "dismantling such wokes."
Leena has been the target of online criticism and a FIR for her Kaali movie poster. A flag for the LGBT community may be seen in the backdrop in addition to the smoking. Leena defended the poster in an interview she shared on Twitter last week after giving it to a foreign news organisation.
With the link, she shared one of her quotes from the interview, which read, “My Kaali is queer. She is a free spirit. She spits at the patriarchy. She dismantles Hindutva. She destroys capitalism; She embraces everyone with all her thousand hands.”
Vivek shared the tweet with tongue-out emojis and wrote, “Can someone dismantle such crazy wokes? Please.”
The filmmaker is facing several FIRs following outrage over the poster of Kaali showing the goddess smoking and holding an LGBTQ flag.
"It feels like the whole nation that has now deteriorated from the largest democracy to the largest hate machine wants to censor me. I do not feel safe anywhere at this moment," Manimekalai wrote while tagging The Guardian and sharing an interview she has given to the British newspaper.
Since the controversy began, Manimekalai, her family and collaborators have received threats from more than 200,000 accounts online, she said.
The Toronto-based director described the online vitriol as a "grand-scale mass lynching" by right-wing Hindu groups.
In her interview to The Guardian, she dismissed claims that her film is disrespectful to the goddess or to Hinduism. She said she had been raised as a Hindu in Tamil Nadu but is now an atheist.
