Introducing the film at the Telluride festival, Booker prize winning author Salman Rushdie said that the movie ‘allows the humanity of its characters to shine through the darkness, even the horror, of the events it describes and because of the skill with which the many narrative strands are interwoven’. At the South Asian International Film Festival in New York, USA, some 1200 New Yorkers, braving a temperature of nine degrees centigrade, queued up at the prestigious Ziegfeld to get tickets for the movie; some of them ultimately had to be turned away after the house was packed.

So what is Firaaq about, that it has been gathering so much adulation?

To this, Nandita says:  ‘Firaaq is an Urdu word that means both separation and quest. It is a human relationship film about the impact of violence on our lives. How different relationships unfold a month after a carnage, over a period of 24 hours. Firaaq is about how violence lingers on much after the obvious manifestation is over. In fact there is hardly any violence in the film but you feel the fear, the tension. It is an ensemble film that traces the emotional journeys of ordinary people - some who were victims, some perpetrators and some who chose to watch silently. It is a mirror to our own prejudices, fears, anger, desire for peace and hope and deals with universal human emotions’.

Firaaq is set on a day, one month after the riots of Gujarat in the year 2002. The movie begins in 2002, where in an early scene, two Muslim men dig a mass grave for the victims. From there, the story jumps forward one month, focussing on the inner discord experienced by the victims of the violence. The story is interwoven of many small stories. Hanif and Muneera who had left their house during the riots, find it ransacked upon their return. Hanif, who feels betrayed vouches for revenge. A middle-class couple, Sanjay and Arati face fresh moral challenges after the riots. Naseeruddin Shah playing Khan Saheb, an old musician, finds himself in a complicated situation as a Muslim in a Hindu neighbourhood, though he had always tried to transcend religious differences. Long-suppressed tensions erupt between Anu and Sameer, an intermarried Hindu-Muslim couple.

The complexities taken by human relationships in the face of a communal violence have been portrayed subtly in the movie. The movie traces the ways, in which violence affects both inner and outer lives of ordinary people affected by the riots.

What is it that inspired Nandita to move beyond the space in front of the camera to the one behind it?

‘I really didn’t think Firaaq would be my first film. Firaaq was born differently. It had to do with waking up to newspapers with stories full of violence, getting into conversations about religion and identity and finding it turn into a polarised debate and meeting victims of violence through my Human Rights’ work. The film began with one story but then there were all these other stories that I had seen, heard, felt and read; that needed to be told. And that is how an ensemble structure evolved, with multiple threads. It was not my desire to direct that found these stories, instead the stories compelled me to direct’.

The movie has been produced by Percept Picture Company; the director Nandita Das has also co-worked on the story and the screenplay of the movie, which boasts of an impressive star cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Deepti Naval, Paresh Rawal, Sanjay Suri and Tisca Chopra.

How did Nandita go about casting her film?

‘While writing the script, I would mentally start casting. Although I was not lucky enough to get all of them, the four I did were precious: Naseeruddin Shah, Paresh Rawal, Raghubir Yadav and Deepti Naval. I got to experience a diverse range of talent as I searched for my characters; and finally an incredible cast came together. The additions to the list were Sanjay Suri, Tisca Chopra, Shahana Goswami, Nowaz and many other wonderful actors. But the most challenging audition was for Mohsin, a six-year-old child. I found Mohammad Samad in the first of the eight different schools I visited in the old city of Hyderabad. The reason he wasn’t an instant choice was because he couldn’t stop smiling! And our little Mohsin in the film was a sad child who smiled only once! So I pressed on through eight other schools before realising that Samad was the one I was looking for. His eyes full of wonder, innocence, intelligence and resilience was what I was looking for’.