Aligarh is really a biographical movie directed by Hansal Mehta as well as written by Apurva Asrani that was released in India in 2015. The primary actors are Manoj Bajpayee and Rajkummar Rao.
There at 20th Busan International Film Festival, the movie received a standing ovation during its global debut. On February 26, 2016, the movie was released globally with positive reviews. For his depiction of Ramchandra Siras, Bajpayee received critical praise and a Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor.
It’s really the actual storey of Ramchandra Siras, a Marathi professor as well as the dean of the Classical Modern Indian Languages Faculty at the prestigious Aligarh Muslim University, whose been suspended on moral grounds. His post as Reader as well as Chair of Modern Indian Languages had also been taken away from him. The video begins with a movie team from a local television station forcibly entering the professor’s home and filming him having sex with a male rickshaw driver. Siras’ university residence is taken away from him, and he is fired.
His case is taken up in court when he is approached by a sympathetic journalist. Siras’ suspension is overturned after the court decides in his favour, and that he is found dead before he can return to work.
Aligarh, Gorakhpur, Agra, Bareilly, and Greater Noida (C-Block; Sector – Gamma 1) were among the locations used throughout the movie. Rajkumar Rao shot a brief indoor sequence in Greater Noida for 3–4 days.
On October 10, 2015, Aligarh made its European premiere there at the 59th BFI London Film Festival.
The response was overwhelmingly positive, and the movie received rave reviews. “A nuanced, compassionate interpretation on a contentious real-life court case concerning the persecution of a gay college professor, Aligarh highlights the rising strength and diversity of Indian indie film,” wrote Screen International in its review.
“Probably the greatest movie ever about the Indian homosexual male experience, Hansal Mehta crafts a fascinating and complex narrative that is as heartbreaking as it is powerful,” wrote the British Film Institute in its ‘What’s On’ assessment of Aligarh. On October 30, 2015, Aligarh had its Indian premiere in Mumbai there at the 17th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.
It is also the only Movie to have opened the festival ever since its establishment. Once again, the feedback was tremendous. In her Mid-Day review, Meenakshi Shedde, South Asia Consultant towards the Berlin Film Festival and award-winning critic, said: Aligarh is a wonderfully crafted movie that bravely speaks out for human rights, especially LGBT rights while maintaining a calm, distilled perspective. “Aligarh is a very incredible movie, a milestone inside the history of Indian cinema which should start the much-needed dialogue about just how India handles a visible and yet largely neglected minority population,” wrote columnist Aseem Chhabra in his rediff.com review.
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