It revolves around a girl who is reunited with her father years after being snatched away at the age of nine and sold to a couple in Chennai
Avinash Lohana (MUMBAI MIRROR; February 12, 2018)

Four months after the release of his last film, the 2017 biographical crimedrama Haseena Parkar with Shraddha Kapoor in the titular role, filmmaker Apoorva Lakhia is hard at work to bring to the screen another real-life story. A while ago, Lakhia had come across an article about nine-year-old Nazeema who was sold in 1984 by some female relatives to a couple residing in Chennai.

Nazeema was subsequently employed as a house-help and after two years of being ill-treated, the young girl managed to escape and was taken in by a Mysore-Brahmin family who raised her, educated her and got her married to an entrepreneur, Sayad, from her own community. After the wedding, she reportedly moved to Saudi Arabia with her husband but continued to be haunted by memories of her father, sisters, her grandmother and the home where she had once lived.

Sayad then got in touch with a detective, R Vardharaj, and with the help of the Chennai police, managed to locate her biological father, Ibrahim Sherrif. He used to work in a teashop in Arcot, a town of Vellore city. “Apoorva was really moved by Nazeema’s story. He immediately bought the rights and is currently developing it into a film script,” informs a source close to the development.

Lakhia has earlier directed Shootout At Lokhandwala in 2007, featuring Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Suniel Shetty, Vivek Oberoi and Tusshar Kapoor, based on a bloody gunbattle between gangsters and the Mumbai police in the Maximum City’s western suburb in 1991. “For this film Apoorva has even met Vardharaj as part of his research. He expects to complete the script in a few months.”