Even if you’re a huge fan of Bollywood films, we don’t think you’re very familiar with the name — Shirish Kunder. To everyone’s surprise; the not-so-successful director of Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar and Priety Zinta starrer ‘Jaan-E-Mann’; and Akshay Kumar – Sonakshi Sinha starrer ‘Joker’ is currently being appreciated like never before for his directorial short film titled ‘Kriti’. The 18-minute-film starring Manoj Bajpayee, Radhika Apte and Neha Sharma was launched by the Bollywood ‘Queen’ Kangana Ranaut on Thursday. The film that was released on YouTube has been watched over 1.3 million times in less than 48 hours and has been widely appreciated by everyone. But then there came a twist.

It was on Friday morning when a Kathmandu based independent filmmaker, Aneel Neupane, took to his Facebook handle to claim that the film has been copied from his Nepali short film titled ‘Bob’. His claim has been positively and seriously taken by the media, and mostly the Indian media. Online portals such as India.com, SchoopWhoop, India Today, Being Indian, The States Daily and a lot more have written on his favor. The 13-minute short film starring Anoj Pandey, Dipak Shakya and Suzie Shah was finished last year in October but the film was first released on Vimeo earlier this year in May.

Both the films tell the story of a schizophrenic patient who is taking the help of a psychiatrist who suggests him to kill the imaginary person he has been in a relationship with to get rid of the situation. Some scenes, details and the dialogues are just too similar to call it a coincidence. This is what Aneel wrote on his Facebook post.

Talking with NeoStuffs, Aneel said, “I am an independent film-maker and it’s hard for me to complete any project in the lack of necessary resources and a good budget. It was my determination and my team’s tremendous efforts that I was able to finish ‘Bob’ and I am not going to let a big shot Bollywood director ruin our hard work. We are going to fight for the justice. I know it’s going to be a hard journey, but I am on for this.” Advocate Rastra Timalsena who will be assisting him with the process told, “The first step will be to file a Copyright Violation report on YouTube. If that works, ‘Kriti’ will be taken down and all the money they have made off this video will be transferred to the claimant’s account. If it doesn’t , we’ll have to file a legal case.”

We’ll have to wait and see what happens next in this case but we’re hopeful that someone’s hard work won’t go in vain. Watch the two films here and let us know what your opinion is.

Bob

Kriti