Dibakar Banerjee on his shelved film ‘Tees’: ‘Not so futuristic after all’

Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees bravely tackles dystopian futuristic cinema – a tricky genre in a country in which the imagined terrors of the future have often already been overtaken by the actual horrors of the present. The events envisaged in Banerjee’s triptych of stories spanning three generations of a Kashmiri family have not only caught up with its characters, but with the movie itself.

Although Tees was announced as a Netflix original title five years ago, it is nowhere on the streaming platform. After the movie was completed in 2022, Netflix shelved the release, sending Tees into the same state of limbo in which one of its key characters floats.

A press release on Netflix’s website from 2019 mentions the film but says that it is called Freedom. The synopsis says: “Directed and produced by Dibakar Banerjee, it is the story of an Indian family interwoven with the personal, ideological and sexual history of India and how desire plays a common role in each.”

According to a report in the American trade publication Deadline from February 2023, “Netflix confirmed it has no plans to release the feature, but has not commented on the reasons for shelving it…Netflix confirmed that it has given Banerjee permission to send links of the film to potential buyers, but the streamer does not appear to support festival screenings of films it’s not planning to release.”

The disappearance of Tees seems to be a direct fallout of the controversy surrounding the Prime Video series Tandav. That show’s depiction of student protests as well as a play containing references to the god Shiva outraged Hindutva supporters. Although Prime Video’s top Indian executive had the offending scenes excised from the show, cases were filed against her in police stations across the country.

Streaming platforms got the message immediately. Series or films with political themes or even indirect references to matters deemed sensitive by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government have all but disappeared.

In Tees, censorship is one of the key themes. The ambitious but unwieldy film has echoes of previous works about autocratic states, from 1984 to Fahrenheit 451. The title refers to a watershed year in the future. In 2030, a communal riot alters the state’s relationship with its citizenry.

In 2043, Anhad Draboo (Shashank Arora) writes a novel about this riot, called Tees, which is banned by the Ministry of Literature.

Intertwined with Anhad’s travails are the back stories of his parents Bunny (Huma Qureshi) and Meera (Ruchi Pujara) in 2019, and Anhad’s grandmother Ayesha (Manisha Koirala) in Srinagar in 1989. The track revolving around Ayesha takes in the troubled relationship between the Pandit and Muslim communities in Srinagar.

Ayesha’s friendship with Usha (Divya Dutta) is tested by the rise of militancy. Ignoring the rips in the social fabric, Ayesha cocoons herself in nostalgia, most vividly expressed in telephone conversations with the son of the Pandit who used to own her home.

Apart from political repression, the screenplay by Dibakar Banerjee and Gaurav Solanki packs in displacement, the discrimination faced by Muslims, inherited trauma, and the suspicion towards same-sex couples. The characters inhabit claustrophobic spaces within which they struggle to breathe or even have meaningful interactions.

Anhad’s world is especially circumscribed, from the narrow alley at a train station where he meets sympathetic ministry official Niharika (Zoya Hassan) to the tenement he shares with loyal family retainer Gasha (Naseeruddin Shah). Loudspeakers blare out instructions on good conduct and broadcast warnings whenever Anhad ventures beyond his assigned boundaries.

The tracks revolving around Bunny and Ayesha also unfold almost entirely inside their homes. One of the early titles of Tees was Ghar, Banerjee told Scroll.

Since Tees cannot be shown commercially, Banerjee has been organising private, non-ticketed screenings aimed at “invited critical audiences” or “a likely business audience who might want to buy the film”, he said.

The 55-year-old director’s credits include Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008), Shanghai (2012) and episodes in the Netflix anthology films Bombay Talkies (2013), Lust Stories (2018) and Ghost Stories (2020). Banerjee spoke to Scroll about the ideas that inspired Tees and his vision of a tomorrow that isn’t very different from today. Here are edited excerpts.

The events depicted in Tees have been perversely mirrored by its non-release. What exactly happened?

Even in my most megalomaniacal imaginations of my everlasting fame did I ever imagine that I would be playing out Anhad’s part in my own life.

In a way, it validates the film – there is no difference between what Anhad feels and what I feel. I am jesting, of course.

We made the film between 2020 and 2022. It was a fantastic experience. Towards the end of the production, Tandav happened. Gaurav Solanki was the co-writer of Tandav.

I have seen what he went through. The situation changed not only for Tees, but for many other projects too. This is where we are at present.

The experience must have emotionally scarred you.

My first thought was – so many dreams fucked over.

So many people were emotionally attached to the film. You can see it in the performances, the work of the cinematographer [Ranjan Palit], the editor [Jabeen Merchant], the production designer [Laxmi Keluskar], the sound designer [Susmit Nath].

I started feeling anger, rage, blackness. My therapist’s bills went up. Then I started coming to terms with the situation and began thinking of giving the film some kind of visibility. If we are not seen, we are not a film. We are nothing.

How did Tees come about?

Gaurav Solanki and I had been wanting to collaborate for a long time. We started working on a project, which we stopped to make this film.

Tees was inspired by Gauri Lankesh’s murder. But I didn’t want to show the killing of a journalist that becomes a revenge story, in which nobody is really implicated.

I was also interested in the fluidity of faith. Our Muslimness or Hinduness is not permanent. Generational shifts in faith keep happening in Indian society, which intrigued me.

Ayesha and Usha were modelled on my mom and sister, who were women from another generation. They were at the crossroads of their own ambitions or the conventionality of patriarchy.

For the future story, I was looking at somebody who is trying to get his story published. It came out of the idea that in the future, just like with films, there will be a board that will allow or censor the publication of books. It also came out of the bizarreness I went through with Kanu Behl’s film Titli, which I had produced. We had absolutely surreal meetings over the film, which left an indelible impression on my brain.

I also wanted to do something about a grandmother in Kashmir or Delhi who wants to write a cookbook. As a joke, either Gaurav Solanki or Varun Grover, I can’t remember who, had the idea that the banned writer should apply for a cookbook that gets refused too. I latched on to the idea.

What is the significance of the year 2030 in the film’s title?

The fabula that we worked out was that somewhere around 2025 or 2026, a party that pays lip service to not otherising minorities comes back to power. Within two years, the coalition breaks up. The otherising party returns to power through parliamentary shenanigans. As they are trying to legitimise their hold, 2030 sees a series of riots in Bombay in which middle-class and upper-class Muslims are targeted.

By this time, enough ghettoisation has happened. It becomes easy for the mobs to target the towers housing the upper-middle class Muslim families. Ayesha asks Anhad, did they really burn them – people are set on fire and thrown into swimming pools. In 2043, Anhad decides to write a book about this riot.

Anhad’s story is set in the future, but directly speaks to our present.

After making the film, we realised that it was not so futuristic after all.

This kind of a movement, where a cruel state generates a spectacle-loving, one-dimensional, strident, WhatsApp uncle citizenry, can only go one way. After a certain point, any kind of division or otherising does not pay. It torpedoes the society from under. When that happens, the military takes over.

So we are showing 2043 as a kind of Pakistan. The Army has taken over. The great leader is called Desh Beti, she is a figurehead backed by the Army. She keeps appearing many times in the film. There is sanctimonious control of citizen behaviour, zoning, permits. The state is always present in terms of advising the citizenry to keep its decorum.

The story begins in Kashmir, with Ayesha and her dynamic with her Pandit friend Usha. This episode reveals how close the families are before they are forced apart. There is also the suggestion of unwitting complicity in the driving out of Kashmiri Pandits, a kind of blinkered nostalgia for a time that can never return.

At a regular level, our identities surface only when we are in conflict. That is when we are forced to define ourselves to some extent.

In Kashmir, there wasn’t just that one identity divide between Hindus and Muslims. There were at least 10 other divisions and inclusions.

You are constantly traversing identities related to economic status, religion, family, tribe, the neighbourhood, the school, food. You are in different religions but in the same school. You are in different schools, but in the same cricket team. You are in different places but are married to somebody from the same area.

Once that complexity is taken out, we get a societal experience where we go from stereo to mono. From the messy business of being everything, you come to this extremely boring existence of being only one.

For example, in Kashmir over the last 30 years, two generations have grown up without an understanding or memory of the Pandit presence. Their experiences are much more monaural. But when you ask the Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits from the 1970s and 1980s about Kashmir, their eyes light up. Something of a richer experience comes out of their memories.

That’s what I wanted to show – this direct connection with a Dolby 7.2 life, in contrast with a mono-life that we seem to be favouring these days.

The film produces discomfort through its visual schema. Characters are boxed into tight frames or corridors. Their stories take place almost entirely in interior spaces.

One of the names that I desperately tried to give the film was Ghar, but the title wasn’t available. The film is about what you call home. I wanted to show three homes in three different times.

For the Bombay one, we found an empty flat and then changed it to what we wanted it to be. Everything else was a set.

The Kashmir house came out of visiting many old Srinagar homes and understanding them architecturally. Ayesha’s house is a Pandit house that has been sold to a Muslim friend. The seller has moved to Delhi but keeps thinking of Srinagar. This is the experience of Pandits of that generation who are connected to their houses.

In the future, we also have the government-aided low-income-group house in Delhi, the MHADA house in Bombay and Anhad’s hovel in a Muslim area.

The visual effects appear rudimentary – were there budget constraints?

I think you are mistaking the rudimentariness of the technology of that time for the rudimentariness of the VFX. There is nothing rudimentary about the VFX. I don’t think a semi-AI drone has been depicted that well.

The signages and visual taste are of an intensely anxious Army state that is helicopter parenting its citizens. There isn’t much money. There’s economic depression, there’s paranoia. Everything is screwed up, but the government is continuing. 2043 in Indraprastha, as they are calling Delhi, is a mix of many things that are pretending.

Dystopian futuristic cinema is tough to pull off in India, where it’s hard to imagine a future that is more challenging than the present.

Before we look at dystopian feature films, we should look at dystopia. Are we in a dystopian future, compared to somebody in, say 1965, or 1999? Yes.

If I were to drop somebody sitting in 1965 into 1993 and say that the Babri Masjid has been demolished, it would be a huge shock to him. When you live through a dystopia, it becomes life.

Is memory is the only defence against this kind of tyranny?

I don’t think it’s the only defence, but it’s a major defence.

Memory is as good as the memory aids a society gives itself. Also, the intention to remember is important. You intend what you forget. You intend what you remember.

India today deeply needs not to forget, and to develop memory aids to keep reminding itself. I am seeing the film too as a memory aid.

You had previously worked with Manisha Koirala in your contribution to Lust Stories. Apart from Koirala, Shashank Arora is terrific too. Huma Qureshi is remarkable, especially in the scene in which she does an awkward dance at a party.

I will work with Manisha again and again and again. I am deeply safe in Manisha’s understanding of life, what she has been through and what she does. I also feel deeply safe in Manisha’s silences.

Huma’s dance was something – she surprised me, even though we had talked about it. She is super-intelligent but she doesn't show it.

I didn’t work extra hard on her. She was shooting another film, in true Bollywood style, when Tees was happening. She brought something to the role.

Shashank is a fuse waiting to go off. He has that quality. I had seen it in Titli.

My work reduces when an actor comes in with an understanding of the mental attitudes that go into the making of the character. I find Shashank riveting in the film, he is one of the reasons I made it, along with Manisha and Naseer.

Naseeruddin Shah’s character is reminiscent of Tungrus from Shyam Benegal’s Mandi (1983).

He is my hero. He has been that hero since the 1970s, when I was a boy. I have not been able to take my eyes off him since then. To be able to work with him in these kinds of scenes and almost take him back to the role he had in Mandi … That told me I was on to something.