Kajol, Shruti Haasan, Neha Dhupia's short film Devi recently became the most talked-about short film on the internet. The film which was written and directed by Priyanka Bannerjee was based on the lives of nine women hailing from different walks of life, brought together in one room.
We understand that all these women, who were dressed in different attires, a burqa-clad woman, a woman in short skirts, in woman in the suit, some women in saree, a young mute woman, and finally Kajol, who was seen in the regular attires of a homemaker who lives in India shared stories of their abuse.
They constantly hear the bell ring, and you understand that there's someone waiting to join them, but you fail to understand the space in which they are all locked in. Finally, when the door opens and an eight-year-old walked in, you are reminded of the traumatising rape incident that took the life of an eight-year-old child.
Soon when you connect the dots, you realise Shivani Raghuvanshi, in the robes of a doctor, represented the victim of the Nirbhaya incident, where a 23-year-old girl was raped in Delhi. While the film has been lauded for making a point effectively, without using religion, the makers have been accused of plagiarising the story from a film named Four.
A student claims the film was originally his idea?
In a Facebook post, Abhishek Rai, a student of Asian Academy of Film and Television, Noida claimed that the film was originally his idea.
The short film Four is centred around the lives of four victims of sexual abuse and includes instances of the horrific 2012 gang-rape incident and the Kathua rape and murder incident.
"Of course our film was a student film, with very little production design, bad audio and stuff, but still it's a child of our own imagination and it's ruthless how anyone can just pick up a piece of thought and claim it to be theirs," Abhishek Rai wrote on Facebook.
He has also called out for support from his batchmates and members of his institution faculty, hoping that some collective action can be taken against the makers of Devi. Meanwhile, neither the makers nor the cast members of the show have shared their response on social media.
