The Kerala Story still not screening in West Bengal, distributor says hall owners 'don’t want to antagonise anyone'

The Kerala Story continued to remain absent from West Bengal’s movie halls for a second day in a row on Saturday as theatre owners remained aloof from screening the controversial film. The Supreme Court overturned a West Bengal government ban on the movie on Thursday and its distributors had tried to interest theatre owners in picking it up, without much success till now.

Satadeep Saha, the distributor of the film in Bengal, said to PTI, "There is no change in the situation, no theatre owner has said yes as yet (to showing the film)." On Friday, he had told the agency, "We have asked the hall owners and multiplex authorities that they can go ahead with the screening since there is no hurdle in showing The Kerala Story now. But till now no one has picked up the move for release here. Maybe they don’t want to antagonise anyone."

The film's director Sudipto Sen at a press conference on Friday claimed he has been told by several hall owners that they have been threatened "by certain quarters" and asked not to screen the film. Sen, who was speaking at a press meet in Kolkata accompanied by the film’s female lead Adah Sharma, claimed an estimated 1.5-2 crore people have already watched the movie all over the country, within two weeks after its release.

The Kerala Story which was released in theatre halls on May 5, claims that women from Kerala were forced to convert to Islam and recruited by the terror group Islamic State (IS). The apex court’s overturning of West Bengal’s ban on the movie was accompanied by a ruling that the movie be screened with a disclaimer that it was a "fictionalised version" and there was no authentic data on claims on the number of women who converted to Islam. (With inputs from PTI)

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