Political Drama Films

"Peter Hermann - Christopher Cox, Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission"

"Topher Grace - Jim Wilkinson, U.S. Treasury Chief of Staff"

"Joey Slotnick - Dan Jester"

"Ayad Akhtar - Neel Kashkari, Assistant Secretary for International Economics and Development"

"I've seen this before: CEOs panic and they sell out cheap. Right now, the Street's running around with its hair on fire, but the storm always passes. We stand strong, and on the other side, we'll eat Goldman's lunch."

"Billy Crudup - Timothy Geithner, President of the New York Federal Reserve"

"Edward Asner - Warren Buffett, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway"

"James Woods - Richard "Dick" Fuld, CEO, Lehman Brothers"

"Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Bal Thackeray"

"[Hello. Ragini, this issue was long forgotten. All the debates have been done. So why dig up old graves now?] Old graves... Asking questions about the death of the 2nd Prime Minister of Independent India, Mr. Lal Bahadur Shashtri...and demanding the truth is digging up old graves for you? Not for me."

"I just want the truth to be out there. Don't we have any right to the truth?"

"Who Killed Shastri?"

"Ankur Rathee as Imran Qureshi"

"Achint Kaur as Mrs. Natarajan"

"Yusuf Hussain"

"Prashant Gupta as Vivendra Pratap Singh Rana"

"Vinay Pathak as Mukhtar"

"Pankaj Tripathi as Gangaram Jha"

"Vishwa Mohan Badola as Justice Kurian Abraham"

"Rajesh Sharma as Omkar Kashyap"

"Mandira Bedi as Indira Joseph Roy"

"Pallavi Joshi as Aiysha Ali Shah"

"Prakash Belawadi as GK Anantha Suresh"

"Mithun Chakraborty as Shyam Sunder Tripathi"

"Naseeruddin Shah as PKR Natrajan"

"Shweta Basu Prasad as Raagini Phule"

"Here's my case, it's all I've got. Thirty-two years of service, thirty-two years of heroism as a United States Marine, regardless of what you decide here, Colonel Childers' career as a Marine is over. He will never again command men in combat. The Ambassador and his family are alive today because of him, and I know how the Ambassador feels because Colonel Childers saved my life too. I am alive today only because of him! I'm alive today and I have a son, because of the heroism of Colonel Childers. To ask this man to risk his life for his country, to ask this man to watch his Marines die in his arms and call it murder when he's defending himself, to call it murder for firing back when being fired upon, to call it murder for saving the lives of his countrymen under the most extreme of circumstances, that's... my fellow Marines... that's hanging him out to dry... and it's worse than leaving him wounded on a battlefield. That is something you do not do if you are a United States Marine, and it is something I pray to God you won't do here either."

"Colonel Terry Childers is a decorated war hero, a trusted leader of American Marines, and I wish that was all there was to it. Unfortunately, there are 83 dead Yemeni citizens, many of them women and children. Colonel Hodges would have you believe that this crowd was armed. He would also have you believe that there is a videotape proving this to be true. There is no tape exonerating Colonel Childers. There is no evidence exonerating Colonel Childers. Is Colonel Childers a man capable of killing defenseless, unarmed people? Is he capable of ordering the execution of innocent men and women? Is he capable of executing P.O.W.s with his own hand? Unfortunately, we have shown that he is. You have heard the sad testimony of Colonel Cao, who witnessed Colonel Childers' barbarism firsthand. You've even heard Colonel Childers' own admission that his desire was to "waste" them, regardless of who they were. Now, we are faced with the difficult prospect of convicting one of our own. None of us wants to do this, but you've heard the facts, and it is unavoidable. Colonel Terry Childers ordered the senseless slaughter of a peaceful crowd! Now, as Marines, we do not get the luxury of covering up our mistakes. We must air them, thereby ensuring that they never happen again."

"I decided to at least show the rough cut to as many studios as I could. I met Siddharth Roy Kapur, MD of UTV, who instantly agreed to do a screening. Very strangely, he didn’t come for the screening and instead sent a creative director who had just joined, and a young girl who had no idea of Indian politics. They loved the film and told me that this was one of the finest films they had seen in a long time and it should get a well-planned release. I wasted a lot of time with them and in the end, was told that ‘as a policy, we can’t be associated with a film of this kind’."

"“Gripping, newsy account of a filmmaker's encounter with radicalism in urban India”"

"Urban Naxals drags you into the hard, brutal and fanatical world thriving beneath the dark shadows of liberalism, free speech and tolerance. Vivek Agnihotri brings the art of storytelling and the craft of filmmaking to breathe life into an ugly phenomenon that has been setting a dangerous national agenda. This is a gripping and disturbing book that constricts your conscience and lingers within long after you’ve finished reading it."

"First they nearly stopped him from making his film. Then they tried to prevent him from screening it. When he took his exquisite and excruciating creation literally to the streets and to the campuses, showing it directly to target audiences, again he was heckled and blocked. I thought to myself, whether we love or hate the film, we cannot allow this in India. In my own university, JNU, another Leftist bastion, it was blocked by the Dean of the School of Arts & Aesthetics, in whose auditorium it was originally to be screened. Instead, the students arranged an outdoor screening, which was attended by over five thousand. The film had a rousing, almost delirious reception. When I saw it, I was moved, disturbed, provoked. It was one of the most original and unusual movies I had encountered in a long time...There is, besides, “a mindset in Bollywood that doesn't let Indic ideas flourish.”"

"The Leftists, liberals and intellectuals and their sympathizers had panned the film as my fantasy. Journalist Saba Naqvi, in a TV debate, even went to the extent of saying that I oppose Naxals because I have no intellect and radical activists like Kavita Krishnan and Shehla Rashid called the film my fantasy. But once the film started getting ground support, their own organizations, forums started inviting me to their seminars, conventions as the main speaker. The doors of literature festivals opened up for me. Academic forums started inviting me to present my views on Urban Naxalism and Intellectual Terrorism. Since the release of the film, I have been travelling the length and breadth of the country for almost 15-20 days a month to give lectures at various prestigious forums."

"This is when I received an email from the Mumbai Academy of Moving Images (MAMI), India’s number one film festival, then chaired by Shyam Benegal, that Buddha In A Traffic Jam was officially selected in the India Gold category which features five or six best films of the year."

"“Urban Naxals is a daring, if unconventional, analysis at how the far left has captured our educational institutions to produce a generation of brain-washed nihilists to wage war on the masses. Urban Naxals is at once irreverent and introspective, moving and hard-hitting. Urban Naxals will leave you shaken and ask you to join the conversation we, as a nation, ought to be having before it is too late.”"

"I can guarantee no other small film in recent times has received so much of appreciation, support and fan following like Buddha in a Traffic Jam."

"If my husband can be a Maoist, so can your father!... They are spread across all over India so you have to run away Vikram."

"The most relevant film of our times... considering what is happening in the country."

"We started getting invitations from Oxford and Cambridge, Australia, Singapore and many American universities and associations. Random people started exposing the lies of people like Raja Sen and Sekhri. Slowly, an army of thousands of Buddha believers started protecting the film from Urban Naxals and started promoting it through unconventional channels. The film found its market, its audience and created an ecosystem. The film got sold to all major digital platforms. It got over a million organic views on YouTube in no time. This is the victory of Buddha."

"This film has been made out of that anger and frustration. This film speaks of the freedom that India needs in 2016, it speaks of that revolution. Only one revolution has been spoken of in this country, never the other. The other revolution will only come from Indianness, from innovation, from creating capital, from creating wealth, it will come when you will send money to your home. No one can starve and revolt. There are some people who want a section of people to starve, so that the other revolution comes and their political shops keep running."

"This is the reason why this film has been made. This film doesn’t agree with a certain thought process. Unfortunately, in India, all the literature festivals, film festivals are run by people with a fixed mindset and a fixed narrative, they are not run by people who love the country, their contribution to India’s capital is zero but to India’s chaos is hundred percent. They won’t let this film show there. That’s why we are here. To show you directly, like the film says, “without the middlemen”."

"... thought-provoking. An idealistic drama, it motivates and instigates the audience for a revolution."

"Slowly but steadily, the film started finding its cult. This is the victory of Buddha. Today, at the end of the year, Huffington Post has released a list of the ten best films of the year and they have rated Buddha In A Traffic Jam as the second best, only after Dangal. Many other prominent listings have rated the film among the three best films of the year. Huffington Post writes in honour of our film, of course after watching it and understanding it: ‘Buddha in a Traffic Jam is a powerful film about morality, corruption, and social injustice that forces us to think about things which we don’t usually pay heed to. The film was panned by the Indian left-wing lobby at the time of its release. The issue at the heart of Buddha in a Traffic Jam is the Naxalite crisis. But the film dares to show us a different side to the Naxalite movement – not as a struggle in the jungle but driven according to a sophisticated business model designed by high-thinking masterminds. Directed by Vivek Agnihotri, Buddha in a Traffic Jam is well-researched and extremely well made. It is a real pity that the film was unjustly censured for leaning towards the right at the time of its release when in actuality it is equally critical of both the extremes. Here is an important film that hopefully will find a cult following in times to come.’"

"On the release day, some three hundred troll handles were opened with zero followers to troll the film. This was led by Arvind Kejriwal’s fans and the group of trolls was led by the queens of trolls – @Rajyashree and Swati Chaturvedi @Bainjal, who later wrote a book on trolls. The best part is that none of them had seen the film. Like they share articles without reading them only on the basis of the headline, they started writing pre-determined reviews and comments. One anonymous guy/girl with the handle @GabbbarSingh trolled the film and called it a shitty film. Reading the comments, I knew that he/she had not seen the film so I deliberately asked which chapter he/she hated the most, which was never replied to. This person had not seen the film but was either paid or motivated to write against the film, otherwise, how can anybody be so stupid?"

"Budda in a Traffic Jam hits hard at the intellectual dishonesty of faculty operating in a system that compromises excellence to promote mediocrity."

"Just an earthen pot! But a rare piece of India's artistic tribal heritage.... I thought about the responsibility that...that education should bring. I thought about why despite of booming economy....and an industrial growth rate rivaling any other in the world....why are we still a poor country? Why are our villagers, our downtrodden, our rural areas, our tribals....all not getting even a single piece of this growth? And then I realized that this pot, has the potential to change all that."

"‘We were alone. We tried to show it in some universities but unfortunately there also the faculty was hand in glove with a lot of anti-national activities and they also rejected our film. Then some students said we want to show this film outside on the street. On 18th March, in JNU, some five thousand students watched this film sitting on the ground, on the street actually, on trees, on terraces and on rooftops. Since then we have not stopped for a moment. This is the first time in the history of world cinema that a film has been shown to so many students and people before the release. Does any manufacturer go out sampling his product, free, before the formal launch of the product? People are generally scared…What happens if my film gets badmouthed, what if people criticize it on social media, then I am doomed. The biggest of the stars will never do that. Second thing, any filmmaker worth his salt will never allow his film to be screened in halls, auditoriums, in amphitheatres, outdoors on streets with thousands of mobile phones ready for piracy. We’ve had screenings with bad sound systems, we’ve shown it right on the wall of a university because there was a lot of wind and the screen was flying like a kite. We have shown this film in places where one channel had conked off."

"Why are we doing this? Why are we showing this film to whoever that invites us? In every institute, university? Because it’s not about the box office, trust me, I am not lying, the mathematics is not on our side. Even if every single person watches this film, this film cannot make the kind of money big films make. Then why are we doing this? The purpose to show this film is to make people realize, to make young students realize that the time has come to work in the direction of innovation. You have to work in a direction where this country can be an innovation hub of the world and that must happen now because we have a golden opportunity."

"The film started getting invitations from film festivals. We won the Best Original Screenplay award at the Madrid Film Festival. The response was overwhelming. I had heard about ‘standing ovations’ but never received one. The response was way beyond ‘standing ovation’. It was the connection. Instead of clapping and taking selfies, people engaged in discussions about Naxalism and other related politics. Almost every time, the discussions became intense with the audience getting into arguments with each other. The film was evoking a definite response. It was stimulating and engaging the audience."

"The attempts to cancel our screenings have reached a figure where now I feel there is a conspiracy behind this pattern. Verbal attacks, ridicule, heckling, resistance, sabotage have been the attractions of this journey."