Parzania does a by-now familiar reversal. Instead of simply creating a feature film that condemns and castigates the perpetrators of communal atrocities through an imaginary story, it takes a very real family tragedy and presents it through authentic-looking locations and professional actors.

Undoubtedly, the dramatisation of real life people can have its own problems. The actor’s craft and his grace layer the real with several dimensions which may not be present in the real event. Films like Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and Russell Crowe’s representation of John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician in A Beautiful Mind, undoubtedly cater to the popular. Commercial pressures bend recent historical characters and events and play up the emotional ingredient to make profits. The process of dramatisation while making the work more acceptable to the public, restructures the story to make it a neat and attractive package for viewers. At the same time, the actor, by the very nature of his profession, lifts the real-life event into the realm of fiction. Such a process involves a great deal of selecting, rejecting, down-playing, emphasising and editing of huge amounts of information available in the actual material. The process of re-making qualitatively changes the very material from which it is made.

The characters in Parzania are relatively under-played in comparison to Russell Crowe’s portrayal of John Nash, where the emotional is rather heavily overlaid on the real. If we assume a 1 to 10 scale of dramatisation where the minimum will be represented by 1 and the maximum by 10; then Parzania will stay close to 3 or 4 while films like Gandhi and A Beautiful Mind will hover around 7, 8, or even 9 where histrionics take over so completely that ultimately the film, ignoring the real, turns into an emotional love story of a certain kind.

... contd.