Court

Court (2015)

A sewerage worker's dead body is found inside a manhole in Mumbai. An ageing folk singer is tried in court on charges of abetment of suicide. He is accused of performing an inflammatory song which might have incited the worker to commit the act. As the trial unfolds, the personal lives of the lawyers and the judge involved in the case are observed outside the court.

Date of release
2015-04-17
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (74)
Runtime
1h 56m
Genres
Drama
Director
Chaitanya Tamhane

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $460K
  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 2. Including: National Film Award for Best Feature Film

Court is a 2014 Indian legal drama film, written and directed by Chaitanya Tamhane in his directorial debut. The film examines the Indian legal system through the Mumbai Sessions Court trial of an aging protest singer, Narayan Kamble, who is accused of encouraging a manhole worker to commit suicide through one of his folk songs. It also stars Geetanjali Kulkarni, Pradeep Joshi and Shirish Pawar.

Production

Director Chaitanya Tamhane made a short film called Six Strands at the age of twenty three, which was well received at several international film festivals. The project left him "broke and jobless" and under pressure to earn money, but he did not want to assist another director.

Tamhane wanted to explore the "judicial nightmare" in an Indian setting after coming across the case of Jiten Marandi, a cultural activist from Jharkhand. Marandi was arrested as a suspect in the Chilkari massacre, which occurred on 26 October 2007, where nineteen people were killed by Naxalites at a public function. Marandi became a suspect because his name was similar to the actual suspect whom the police could not find.

It felt like the complete opposite of what I, as an audience, would expect from a courtroom film; the lawyers were not good orators, the documents were misplaced, the arguments were technical and redundant. I was amused by this setting, and decided to probe further.

Tamhane found the incidents that occur in a lower court to be "bizarre" and saw the potential for drama and humour. Another incident which prompted Tamhane to make the film was when a friend had gone to a police station for document submission and had to wait two hours for a printout because the constable did not know how to connect the cable of the printer.

In 2011, Tamhane met with his friend Vivek Gomber, who he had directed in a theatrical play called Grey Elephants in Denmark in 2009. Tamhane told Gomber that he wanted to write a courtroom drama but did not have the money to finance his project. Gomber then expressed his interest in producing the film and offered to pay him ₹15,000 (US$160) a month to write the script.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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