MUMBAI: Adlabs formally announced that it had acquired worldwide distribution rights of critically acclaimed docudrama Black Friday, on Thursday.
The film will be distributed nationwide and overseas by Adlabs on 9 February, 2007. Black Friday, presented by Mid-Day Multimedia, is based on the events leading up to and the investigation following the 1993 bomb blasts that tore Mumbai apart.
Elaborating on the announcement, Adlabs Films’ COO-film distribution Sunir Kheterpal says, “Black Friday is a bold and brave story that is waiting to be told to the Indian public and we are very happy to be facilitating its release on the scale and the platform that a film like Black Friday truly deserves.”
The film was banned two years ago by the Mumbai High Court, despite the film having acquired a censor certificate. A petition filed by a group of persons accused under the 1993 bomb blasts case, had challenged the release of the film until the special TADA court delivered its judgment on the case. The judgment was delivered on 12 September 2006 and 100 of the 123 accused, including four members of prime accused Tiger Memon’s family, were convicted.
The 1993 Mumbai blasts left 257 dead and 1400 injured and brought into the spotlight the mafia-terrorist nexus prevalent today. Based on S Hussain Zaidi’s book on the same subject, the film takes one into the heart of the conspiracy behind the blasts and the massive follow-up investigation, by giving detailed accounts of planning, execution and back-end operations of the same.
Produced by Arindam Mitra and directed by Anurag Kashyap, the film features Kay Kay Menon, Pavan Malhotra and Aditya Srivastava, who play inspector Rakesh Maria, Tiger Memon and police informer ‘Badshah Khan’ respectively.
Black Friday was screened in competition at the Locarno Film Festival in 2004, where it gained global recognition and appreciation from worldwide buyers and avid film watchers. Subsequently it was screened at festivals in Germany, Estonia, South Korea and the USA. It was awarded the Grand Jury prize at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles in 2005.
