Janhvi Kapoor and Varun Dhawan starrer ‘Bawaal’ has sparked controversy internationally.
The Jewish human rights body Simon Wiesenthal Center has objected to the Nitesh Tiwari directorial and called the film a ‘banal trivialisation of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust.’
SWC Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action, Rabbi Abraham Cooper has asked Amazon to ‘stop monetising Bawaal’ with immediate effect.
He said, ‘Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is the quintessential example of Man’s capacity for Evil. By having the protagonist in this movie declare that ‘Every relationship goes through their Auschwitz,’ Nitesh Tiwari, trivializes and demeans the memory of 6 million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler’s genocidal regime.’
‘If the filmmaker’s goal was to gain PR for their movie by reportedly filming a fantasy sequence at the Nazi death camp, he has succeeded. Amazon Prime should stop monetizing Bawaal by immediately removing this banal trivialization of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust,’ the statement concluded.
For those who haven’t watched the film yet, the film’s lead characters travel to World War 2 sites and visit a gas chamber in Auschwitz. In one scene, Janhvi’s character Nisha talks about human greed and says, ‘We’re all a little like Hitler, aren’t we?’. In another scene, the character is heard saying, ‘Every relationship goes through their Auschwitz’ implying that every relationship has its struggles.
In a recent interview with Pinkvilla, director Nitesh Tiwari defended his film and said, ‘I am a bit disappointed with the way some people have comprehended it. That was never the intention. It would never be my intention to be insensitive in any which way… Don’t we see Ajju and Nisha getting completely troubled and moved by what they see in Auschwitz? They do. They see the prisoners, they see how they were stacked, they see how they were exterminated. Are they being insensitive about it? No. They are moved to tears.’
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