MID-DAY (December 9, 2019)

After bringing the 1897 Battle Of Saragarhi to the big screen earlier this year, Sunir Kheterpal, the producer of Kesari, has greenlit a film based on the life of IAS officer Durga Shakti Nagpal, who currently serves as the officer on special duty to Agriculture Ministry.

Nagpal burst into the national spotlight in 2013 when she blew the lid on the illegal sand mining mafia in Gautam Budh Nagar in Uttar Pradesh. This led her to getting stuck in a political conflict, with the Uttar Pradesh government suspending her for allegedly demolishing an illegal mosque wall in Greater Noida. After a growing demand from various political parties and public for her suspension to be revoked, Nagpal was reinstated to duty with full honour. Khetarpal has teamed up with Romeo Akbar Walter maker Robbie Grewal for the movie.

The duo is currently in talks with several female actors for the central role. "Our priority is providing entertainment to audience while not compromising on powerful content. With the story of Durga Shakti, we want to make the audience aware of this ideal hero," says Khetarpal. Looking forward to roll the project in mid-2020, Grewal says it's a "privilege" to narrate Nagpal's story.

Roshmilla Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; January 15, 2014)

There are many rumours buzzing around Sujoy Ghosh these days, one of them being that he is reworking Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation of the Sunil Gangopadhyay novel, Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest). The filmmaker admits that he toyed with the idea till he realised that it would not be possible to contemporarise the film since the social setting, the characters’ angst and their thoughts, were typical to the 70s and would not strike a chord with today’s audience. “And it wouldn’t make sense to make a period drama since we already have Ray’s classic,” he points out.

So, instead of attempting to remake Days and Nights in the Forest, Sujoy went ahead and wrote a story about friendship for director Arindam Sil. “It is an interesting screenplay which took my co-writer Partho Dasgupta and me a year to write and revolves around a group of friends discussing contemporary issues. It’ll be a Bengali film but has nothing to do with Aranyer Din Ratri,” Sujoy asserts.

Meanwhile, he is locking the locations—one of which will be Kolkata--for his next film as a director which he hopes to flag off soon.

It’s a thriller starring Vidya Balan and Irrfan Khan. Speculations are rife that Vidya’s character is modeled on Durga Shakti Nagpal, the civil servant whose drive against corruption led to her suspension and later reinstatement by the UP government and sparked headlines. “Utterly, absolutely rubbish, it’s a brand new script,” insists Sujoy. He’s equally quick to squash rumours that it’s not Kahaani 2 under a new name. “A sequel to Kahaani would be an exciting proposition but Kahaani 2, Kahaani 3, Kahaani 4, how long can I go on without getting bored out of my head?” he argues. “I owe it to myself, to my actors and to the audience to try and make a new and better film. I’ve been working on this script for four years,” he adds.