Cast of ‘Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana’ comes visiting

There is a popular billboard that clucks each time you pass an eatery in Punjab. It's a big fat hen, squatting and crowing with the tagline - 'meet me anywhere, but eat me here.' So, not long after two fellow Punjabis sat across the table, digging into juicy tandoori chicken, it was food that became the subject of their next film, one that is releasing this Friday, and is deliciously titled, 'Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana'.

Directed by Amritsar-born Samir Sharma and co-written along with its lead actor Kunal Kapoor, also with roots in Amritsar, 'Luv Shuv...' is a tribute to the world of tandoori tikkas and butter chicken and how food brings together one very dysfunctional family of Punjab. Shot in Lalto outside Ludhiana, this medium budget film is supposedly the first food film of the country. "More than anything, the chicken in the film is a metaphor. There is love, a dead body which is shuv, and this Khurana family on the search for the missing magical recipe," says Kapoor.

The story goes - the Khuranas run a dhaba and take pride in their food, especially the family recipe of Chicken Khurana.

But unfortunately, it gets lost when the patriarch, played by Vinod Nagpal, loses his memory and with that the secret recipe too. The family looks for a copy of the recipe and also tries to cook it in various permutations and combinations to get the exact taste. "It's a mad quirky film. I call it a car crash between a Yashraj film and a Anurag Kashyap film, so it's a Kashraj," laughs Kapoor adding that it is also is Kashyap's first production of a family entertainer.

"With this film, Anurag has been domesticated. For the first time, a family can watch a Anurag Kashyap film as it has no abuse, violence or bloodshed," Kapoor says, adding that they tease Kashyap on the 'damaging impact of such a film on his dark filmmaker reputation'. But the foodie in Kashyap could not refuse Kapoor and Sharma when they came knocking at his door to back as a producer. "This film is like a Juno or Little Miss Sunshine, or the ones Hrishikesh Mukherjee used to entertain us with. It's a coming-of-age film, of love, friends, family, of lost and found," says Kashyap.

... contd.

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