Anubhav Sinha spent years living with anxiety before ‘Ashi’ became a film.
The director, who launched his socially conscious second act with 2018’s “Mork,” told Variety that between news reports and candlelight protests, the topic of sexual violence never completely left his mind. “Maybe it will disappear from the anterior lobe,” he says. “But it remains there.” That reckoning came when he stopped blaming the system and turned to the home.
The film, which takes its title from the Hindi word for 80 (referring to the approximately 80 rapes reported daily in India) and was written by Sinha with co-writer Gaurav Solanki and produced by Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar and Sinha under the banner of T-Series Films and Benaras Media Works, uses that statistic as both a provocation and a structural device. At its heart is Parima, a schoolteacher and mother who is found near the railway tracks in the aftermath of a gang rape, and while her case unfolds in a Delhi courtroom, the film also questions where the crime began and what it left behind. Taapsee Panu plays the lawyer, Kani Kusruti the survivor and Revathy the judge, while the ensemble also includes Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Manoj Pafa, Kumud Mishra, Naseeruddin Shah, Supriya Pathak and Seema Pafa.
For the better part of two decades, Sinha worked in a register far removed from social research. While his early career saw him make compelling commercial entertainment like the romantic drama “Tumbin,” the sci-fi spectacle “Ra.One” and the action film “Dus,” his deliberate reinvention, starting with 2018’s “Mulk,” repositioned him as one of Hindi cinema’s more uncompromising spokespeople on caste, religion and gender. ‘Article 15’, ‘Thappad’, ‘Anekh’ and ‘Beed’ followed in quick succession, each targeting a different fault line in Indian national life, culminating in the Netflix series ‘IC 814: Kandahar Hijack’, a dramatization of the 1999 Indian Airlines hostage crisis. “Everything that’s a hit today is something I did 20 years ago,” he told Variety, “and I get to do it again.” However, he added that it is still open whether there will be a return to the previous mode.
Sinha has made it clear that he wanted ‘Assi’ to be about a phenomenon rather than a single incident. “This is a story of rape,” he says. “This is not a personal story.” Although the story bears superficial similarities to documented cases, he and Solanki deliberately avoided pinning it to specific events, studying patterns that repeated across cases, such as gang rapes, assaults in moving vehicles, and victims who were then discarded, rather than reenacting specific crimes. The shift from institutional responsibility to self-examination is where the film finds its true theme. “I was cursing the judiciary,” Sinha recalls. “Then I blamed the police. And then I realized it was actually us.”
That exploration shapes the film’s portrayal of systemic flaws, including legal institutions that cannot act without evidence, a police apparatus unequipped to detect private violations, and a society that normalizes what it cannot confront. Sinha says the best thing to do is for the audience to leave feeling uncomfortable rather than being relieved of it. “I wonder how many people who watch this movie will come away with the idea that they have to think about this,” he says. “They’re going to feel like some of the songs their kids are dancing to are offensive and inappropriate because we don’t see it that way. It’s normalized.”
The film’s courtroom scenes received particular praise for their unshowy procedural texture. Its credibility comes from field research. Two lawyer friends introduced Sinha to the Patiala House Court in Delhi, after which Sinha sent his entire crew, including Pannu, who attended wearing a burqa, to observe the trial separately. “My own court of ‘Marc’ began to seem stupid and ridiculous to me,” he says. Production designer Nikhil Kobale and his team followed suit, with the background extras being guided through careless tasks that overlapped with the actual trial, rather than the frenetic pantomime typical of Bollywood courtroom scenes.
Derry itself was deliberately photographed contrary to print. Sinha and cinematographer Ewan Mulligan chose the city’s dirt and density over its monuments and parkways. “Iconic Delhi is a very safe Delhi,” says Sinha. “But the real Delhi begins after that.” The inside of a subway car provided spectators with a vantage point from which to observe neighborhoods previously seen only as tourists.
Casting followed the director’s habit of writing to the face. Pannu was given before writing existed. Kusruti’s casting emerged after Sinha spent weeks briefing casting director Mukesh Chhabra on the actress’s name, but did not reveal the actress’s name until Chhabra volunteered her name. Revathy was Chhabra’s suggestion for the judge, who needed the film to maintain neutrality throughout the story, refraining from giving an easy verdict. After a scheduling breakdown nearly cost the actor a complete loss, one follow-up call from Chhabra, prompted by Sinha on the eve of filming, revealed that her other projects had fallen through and she thought the role was being recast.
This film refuses to view sexual violence as solely abnormal or pathological. “I’ve tried to humanize rapists, too,” Sinha says. “The sooner we understand and accept that they are one of us, the sooner we can get to the root of the problem.” He traces the underlying causes to entitlement calcified by patriarchy and a society that treats sex as taboo and saturates popular culture with provocative images. That contradiction is made clear in the film in a scene featuring a Bollywood hit routinely performed by children on national television.
On the issue of narrative record, Sinha is straightforward. He makes his films with commercial capital, not subsidies, and the obligation to recoup that investment governs every storytelling choice. “I’m too mainstream for arthouse, too arthouse for mainstream,” he says. He argued that European film festivals could help widen the standards of what counts as serious Indian film, noting that the films selected there tend to approximate European narrative grammar. Sinha agreed that festivals like Busan are programming a more representative range, adding that even Cannes has made an exception, where Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas premiered, and said the preference for a single cinematic expression misrepresents what Indian cinema really is.
The Indian theatrical version of Assi proved more difficult to decipher than Sinha had anticipated. The film was seen in theaters by more than 1 million people in India and recouped its investment through advance sales, but the critical response fell short of what it suggested was possible. Sinha suspects that the word “disturbing”, the word most often used by critics, may have deterred general readership. The film will be released on streamer ZEE5 on April 17, and he says he will feel that the commercial image is fully resolved only after it is screened there as well.
As for the future, Sinha is less certain than at any point in the second act. He explains that “Assi” has affected him even more deeply than previous disappointments, and that he watches recent genre films with the awareness that a different perspective may be needed. “I need to find a new self as a film director,” he says. What that looks like remains an open question.
