Karan Tejpal’s Stolen begs you not to blindly believe that WhatsApp forward

Stolen takes us into an unnamed place in the rural Rajasthan where two urban brothers are accidentally drawn in a case of kidnapping, and their spirals of the world shortly after. The passers -by come and go, and the brothers are sucked in the cycle of the rumors of WhatsApp and the violence that followed. At home, their mother, who plans to remarry, awaits them impatiently. Abhishek Banerjee, who plays the older brother, tells me that when they were running the Lynching of the crowd in the film, an elderly gentleman ended up intervening, not knowing that it was a shoot.

“When I rewarch the film recently, I noticed that we had kept it in the film,” said Banerjee, joined by Tejpal and producer Gaurav Dhingra on Zoom. “But it is interesting that it only intervenes after the cops and their jeeps came to save the character who is lynched. He could not bring together courage earlier, but he was the only one to move forward.”

Is there an inherent evil that remains the hand of the innocent spectator? Where do people like the elderly gentleman disappear when a crowd goes beyond our common sense and our humanity? The way Banerjee sees it, Stolen is not against the idea of ​​a crowd. The film, he notes, shows us three types of crowds: the first who is confused and wants to help the poor woman whose daughter has been removed from a station in the middle of the night; the second with a thirst for blood and a feeling of distorted justice; And the third which ultimately guarantees justice for the stolen child.