Dibakar Banerjee’s latest offering, Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2, has opened to critical acclaim. But the filmmaker has yet to move on from the pain of his unreleased work, Tees. Spanning three generations of a family, Tees is said to reflect “the personal, ideological and sexual history of India”. Netflix was slated to release it in 2022, but pulled the plug on it—an episode that Banerjee says he hasn’t been able to move past. “It’s definitely not easy to go on, keeping aside the project I gave my all to. Your therapist bills go up a lot when the sense of repression, rage, anger, and absolute helplessness catch you, and you have to still plod on through the day,” says the director.

Banerjee is known for his searing films, from Shanghai (2012) to Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar (2021), and it’s heard that Tees was no different, a scathing political movie. The filmmaker is now seeking producers to buy it from the streaming giant. “In 2022, [the officials at] Netflix said, ‘Looking at the times around us, we don’t think it would be correct to release this film.’ They owned the film. They paid me fully. So, they can do whatever they want.”