On Saturday, director Kanu Behl’s Despatch had its Indian première at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. But the filmmaker’s journey of the Manoj Bajpayee-starrer began in 2016 as he, with co-writer Ishani Banerjee, set out to explore the world of journalism. “Stories about journalism often end up being one-dimensional—there are God-like protagonists fighting to break a story. I always felt that a better understanding of how the world looked from the inside was missing. I had been toying with the idea, and it criss-crossed with so much violence happening with journalists, starting with Gauri Lankesh. The world around us was changing so much.  So, I decided to do a Faustian piece about a journalist, who is breaking a story, but not only with an altruistic purpose. Ishani and I dove into eight-nine months of research, looking into several cases of journalists getting [killed].”

Gauri Lankesh