Dibakar Banerjee: Your therapist bills go up; you feel rage, helplessness

Dibakar Banerjee opens up on needing therapy to deal with the trauma of his unreleased film, Tees

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.”

He is well-aware that a director like him has to constantly hustle to take his movies to the audience, more so when it’s a political drama. Banerjee believes the genre of political dramas is dead in India, where the population indulges in hero-worshipping and has become numb to critical thinking. “Between oligarchy of distribution, OTT platforms, retail outlets, all the companies that disburse content today and a state that’s anxiously trying to curtail the expression of diversity of thought, this was supposed to happen. When you hand over your destiny to the Baahubali who promises to deliver you from all evil, when you stop thinking and engaging in collective action and become a crowd instead of a dynamic society, this is inevitable.”

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