QISSA reviews: Starring Irrfan Khan & Tisca Chopra

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Nikki

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Posted: 10 years ago

Bollywood supports Irrfan Khan's 'Qissa'

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Mumbai, Feb 20: The makers of Irrfan and Tisca Chopra starrer "Qissa" organised a special screening of the film for film industry friends, in Mumbai, Thursday. Besides Irrfan and Tisca Chopra, it was attended by filmmaker Tigmanshu Dhulia, producer Goldie Behl and actresses Shabana Azmi and Swara Bhaskar. Yesteryear Bollywood actress Waheeda Rehman also made it to the screening.

Shabana Azmi was impressed with the film and minced no words in praising the film's lead actors-Irrfan and Tisca Chopra.

Written and directed by Anup Singh, "Qissa" was screen at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival where it won the Netpac Award for World or International Asian Film. Meanwhile, "Qissa" has released in India today and it is being lauded by one and all.

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqEtwhFMKZ4#t=42[/YOUTUBE]

Anup Singh's Qissa' gets multi-platform release

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By indiantelevision.com Team Posted on : 20 Feb 2015 01:11 pm

NEW DELHI: Qissa by Anup Singh, which has already won accolades on the international festival circuit, has finally hit the theatres.

Interestingly in a unique venture, the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) decided to release the film across multiple platforms simultaneously. It has been released theatrically, on DVDs, and on some websites as well.

NFDC general manager and head of marketing Vikramjit Roy told Indiantelevision.com that the international acclaim that the film had won all over the world and in India made it necessary for it to be made available on all formats. Roy said that it was not a typical film and therefore the NFDC had decided not to treat its release in a typical manner.

Meanwhile, Anup Singh toldIndiantelevision.com that the 2013 film has so far been to around 100 film festivals and won 15 awards, including one in India.

He said the Punjabi film was based on an original story and could be seen in various ways. It had been inspired by the stories he had heard of his grandfather's struggle during the partition of the country. But the idea of bringing up a girl child as a boy could be seen as symbolic of many things: the desire for the head of the family to have a male child after three daughters, the way many female children were dressed as boys during Partition to save them from exploitation, and the way history and tradition continues to affect even modern contemporary Indian society.

Among other places, the film was one of the nine Asian films in competition at the 20th Festival International des Cinmas d'Asie in Vesoul in France.

Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost was also the opening film of the 43rd International Film Festival at Rotterdam from 22 January to 2 February last year and this marked the European premiere of the film. It won the Audience Award at that Festival.

The award comprising Euro 10,000 (Rs 9 lakh approx) is given to the most voted film supported by the Hubert Bals Fund.

Qissa which received the Hubert Bals Fund for Script & Project Development in 2004, was made with further support from the Netherlands Film Fund, and was co-produced by Dutch company Augustus Film.

Set in post-colonial India, the film stars Irrfan Khan as a Sikh who has fled his village to escape ethnic cleansing at the time of partition who tries to start a new life for his family. The film stars Irrfan Khan with Tisca Chopra, Tillotama Shome, Rasika Dugal, Sonia Bindra and Faezeh Jalali among others.

Qissa is represented internationally by Germany's The Match Factory GmbH. The film had its North American and Asian premieres at the Toronto International Film Festivaland Busan International Film Festival respectively.

Earlier, the film added one more feather in its cap when actor Tillotama Shome won the Best Actress award in the New Horizons competition at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.
In Qissa, Shome plays the youngest daughter of Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan) who decides to raise her as a boy.

Shome made her screen debut with Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding in 2001 and went on to play roles in Florian Gallenberger's Shadows of Time and Dibakar Banerjee's Shanghai.

Qissa also won the Silver Gateway Award in India Gold competition at the 15th Mumbai Film Festival and the NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award for Best Asian Film at the 38th Toronto International Film Festival where it had its premiere.

Edited by touch_of_pink - 10 years ago

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Nikki

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Posted: 10 years ago

Azmi Shabana @AzmiShabana

Arun Singhs Qissa is a v powerful film with overall terrific performances. Frightening how deep d roots of Patriarchy are .Deeply disturbing

Azmi Shabana @AzmiShabana

Anup Singhs direction is masterful n restrained. He shows how suggested violence is far more chilling than graphic depictions of it #Qissa

Azmi Shabana @AzmiShabana

Irrfan Khan is a giant of an actor.Tisca Chopra Tillotama Shome, Rasika Duggal give outstanding performances.#Qissa. Congrats #NFDC

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1020442

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Posted: 10 years ago

Qissa centered around '47 partition ?

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adventurousman

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Posted: 10 years ago

Is it out on net? Irfan said dvds will be out on the same day

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Nikki

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Rajat Kapoor @mrrajatkapoor

Finally Anup Singh's brilliant QISSA releases in cinemas today. Find out where it is playing and watch it for @irrfan_k @TillotamaShome..

Nimrat Kaur @NimratOfficial Mumbai, Maharashtra

What an incredible weekend ! Two most awaited films #Badlapur and #Qissa release together !! Hey free dayyy come soon already !!!!

Swara Bhaskar @ReallySwara

Rendered speechless aftr watchng #Qissa ! An effective moving unsettling exploration of our psyche TREMENDOUS performances by all MUST WATCH

riteshbatra @riteshbatra

Every1 go watch Anup Singh's beautiful movie #Qissa tomorrow, @irrfan_k @TillotamaShome @tiscatime @RasikaDugal as always = amazing.

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'Qissa' review: Irrfan Khan and Tisca Chopra marvel in this moving story about human emotions

Friday, 20 February 2015 - 5:05pm IST | Place: Mumbai | Agency: dna

Tushar Joshi

Film: Qissa

Film: Qissa
Cast: Irrfan Khan, Tisca Chopra, Tillotama Shome, Rasika Dugal
Director: Anup Singh
Rating: ***

What's it about:

Qissa is a performance heavy film with a story that will touch your heart and make you think. A departure from the traditional style of story telling, Anup Singh sets his film during the tumultuous time of partition. Dealing with issues of gender identity the story is of Irrfan Khan and his wife Tisca Chopra who gave three daughters. Irrfan yearns for a son and when his wife bears his another daughter he decides he will raise her as a boy. Hardly a simple task, Tillotama Shome who plays this androgynous character grows up confused not understanding why she was brought up this way. There are several other tracks in the film that add drama to the story.

What's hot:

Singh is effortless in his attempt to have his lead characters Irrfan and Tisca become the characters they set out to portray. The treatment and execution of the film is mature yet engaging. Dialogues speak from the heart to you as the tale progresses. Irrfan is brilliant as Umber the man caught in a two fold battle of protecting his family lineage and also dealing with the changing political situation. Tisca gives him the perfect support and breathes life into her part. Cinematography is excellent and fills up the canvass with rich landscape. Tillotama Shome's role is tricky and difficult yet she handles the task ahead of her with confidence.

What's not:

The pace is definitely a big dampener and you need to be really patient to experience what these characters are going through. It is a serious subject so don't go expecting a partition drama in the typical sense.

What to do:

Watch it for a moving story about human emotions and people grappling with changing times. Irrfan and Tisca are terrific in Qissa.

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Nikki

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Qissa Review

1 day ago by Surabhi Redkar

Qissa Movie Poster

Rating: 3/5 Stars (Three stars)

Star Cast: Irrfan Khan, Tillotama Shome, Rasika Duggal, Sonia Bindra, Tisca Chopra

Director: Anup Singh

What's Good: The daring show of how one man's misogynist nature results in ruining the lives of those close to him. This film is exemplary for all those instances of female oppression that our country has been plagued with since times immemorial.

What's Bad: The confluence of magical realism in a story that could have been dealt with in a much stronger manner. Missing attention to graver issues of Kawar who is going through a difficult identity crisis in a second half which was expected to lift the story higher. A slightly dragging screenplay really plays down the rich story.

Loo break: A quick one may not harm!

Watch or Not?: Qissa is a painful story dealing with issues of identity crisis and is particularly hard-hitting. The raw nature of this film is not meant for everyone and so watch this film if you want to see something meaningful.

User Rating:

19 Votes

Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan) is a Sikh who is forced to leave his homeland in the atrocious time of Partition. While Umber is busy fighting for his town, his wife Meher (Tisca Chopra) who is in hiding along with the clan's women and children, gives birth to their third daughter. Umber who is hoping against hope to finally see a male heir is once again left in dismay. To spare themselves of the scarring riots of partition, Umber Singh and his family move to the Indian acquired Punjab.

After having set up a decent living with the wood business, Meher is once again bearing a child and this time Umber is sure of having a son. As Meher gives birth to her fourth daughter, blinded by his desperacy for a son, Umber declares the fourth child as his son and even forces a rather scared Meher to do so.

Kawar (Tillotama Shome) is grown up to be a male and is taught every possible masculine thing by her overbearing father. In this coming of age tale, how will Kawar deal with the conflict of being raised as a man in a woman's body when he gets married to a girl?

Irrfan Khan and Tisca Chopra in a still from movie Qissa'

Qissa Review: Script Analysis

As a kid when we did role-playing and played husbands even after being girls, imagine what if you never came out of that? Well, yeah this story of Kawar gives you goosebumps. This film is a slap on the face for the Indian matriarchal society which preaches that a male heir is a solution to all their third world problems. The story is intense and when you see a scene where in the twelve year old child who is taught to be boy get his first period completely leaves you speechless.

I agree that there is nothing perplexing about the story but the way it has been presented certainly makes it thought-provoking. If only, the film maker had stuck to telling a story that deals with the conflicting mind of a coming of age girl and the sexual tension between her and her wife, this script would have been flawless. The inclusion of magical realism with elements such as ghosts makes it overly surreal and loses the grip that it starts with.

Qissa Review: Star Performances

Irrfan Khan yet again shows that he is a magnificent actor. He is brilliant as a misogynist Umber Singh. Apart from the dialogues, it is Irrfan's silences that speak volumes for his acting talents. He certainly has an eye for scripts and this role is enough to make sure that you are left with enough disgust for his character.

Tisca Chopra as Meher does not make cheese of this role. She is in fact a little disappointing as a mother who does not stand up to save her daughter's life. Tisca failed at making us feel for her character.

Tillotama Shome is excellent as Kawar. She is perfect with her expressions that show the conflict within. Shome outshines in the second half in a scene when she decides to defend her father and accept herself as a girl.

Rasika Duggal as Neeli who is married to Kawar really catches your attention as the sparky gypsy girl. She plays her character with full potential and in certain scenes even does a better job than Shome. Neeli is the character you truly pity.

Qissa Review: Direction, Editing and Screenplay

Qissa does not run longer than two hours but still the screenplay drags in the second half. Anup Singh builds a gripping first half but his story flounders in the second half. The background score is rich and is helpful in filling up the pain. Other than stellar performances by the actors, the cinematography of Qissa is a delight. Especially the shots of locations that express the void and empty nature of its characters is worth appreciating.

Singh makes sure that his story touches you and leave you with a thought. The director makes no mistakes in showing disdained lands of a post partition land and re-creates the era really well. Qissa could have been a masterpiece had it not ventured into confusing the audience in the second half with its surreal nature.

Qissa Review: The Last Word

Qissa is a painful story and it is strictly meant for those who watch films for their rich content and not its entertaining quotient. In a way it is a depressing film and may not make up for a friendly watch. I thoroughly enjoyed its raw nature and so I am going with a 3/5 for this film.

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Nikki

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Qissa movie review: Irrfan Khan film is lambent, lovely and seductive

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Qissa movie review: The well-chosen ensemble is wonderful. Irrfan, as the man who knows how to love only corrosively, and Tisca Chopra as the woman as his loyal, put-upon wife who has enough spirit left over to protect her girls, both feel true and lived-in.

Written by Shubhra Gupta | New Delhi | February 20, 2015 5:21 pm

Qissa movie review
Star Cast: Irrfan Khan, Tisca Chopra, Tillotama Shome, Rasika Dugal
Director : Anup Singh

Qissa' can also be called kahani', and both mean the same, story. But the equivalence is not exact: a qissa' has the feel of a yarn, a rambling tale told, perhaps by the fireside, with threads loose enough to twine and separate, whenever the storyteller wishes to pick it up again.

Some of that feel comes through in Anup Singh's powerful, evocative film that calls itself, generically, Qissa', and tells a very specific story about a man whose desire to have a son drives him into a place of no return. It is set in the time of Partition, which is, so to speak, as generic as it can be, and yet it is a time of itself, because of the specificity of Umber Singh (Irrfan), his wife (Tisca Chopra), and his four daughters, the last of whom he raises as a son.

Anup Singh's weaving in of gender politics in his Qissa' is masterful. It comes, one suspects, of having grown up with first-hand accounts of some of the horrors"the killing, the blood-letting, the unending violence " we are shown in the beginning (the director's family was a victim of Partition, and his father left the county soon after).

"Ai ki na mardaan wali baat", is something you hear a Punjabi male tell his puttar' with great pride. Umber is that man, and he is dying to say that to his son, who is finally born unto him. His conviction is complete, and his hold over his women, is so strong that they believe what he believes. And Kanwar (Tillotama Shome) grows up thinking of herself as male, despite all evidence to the contrary, even the tell-tale patch of menstrual blood that seeps out from within one night.

It is when Kanwar is forced, by quirk of circumstance, into a marital compact with pretty tribal girl Neeli (Dugal), that the unraveling begins, and we are confronted by the thorny questions that the film places in our face: what, exactly, is masculinity; does only having the' appendage make you male; why should sexual intimacy be defined by gender: two people, of any sex, can love, and desire, and complete each other.

Qissa' is lambent, lovely, and completely seductive up till this point. It then tumbles into another zone, where an accident leads to a death, and the appearance of a ghost', and the tale stutters. Some of the fluidity goes missing, and it becomes a little too opaque. But its joys are greater, and are for savouring: the lilt of the rustic Punjabi the characters speak, not letting the effort show, the authenticity of the locations, the intense longing that pervades not only Umber Singh's being, but the entire countryside, for a son who will be an heir, the qissa' itself.

The well-chosen ensemble is wonderful. Irrfan, as the man who knows how to love only corrosively, and Tisca Chopra as the woman as his loyal, put-upon wife who has enough spirit left over to protect her girls, both feel true and lived-in. And the film shines when Shome and Dugal play with, and off each other, the former doing a terrific job of her challenging part of a girl/boy/man/woman, of living in limbo not knowing who she/he really is, and the latter who grows, from a frisky, feral girl to a strong, sympathetic all woman.

Some wounds are so deep that the only way to heal is to come to an end. And that goes for a kind of love and longing, too, as told in this full-bodied, satisfying, disturbingly lyrical Qissa'.

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Nikki

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Originally posted by: adventurousman
Is it out on net? Irfan said dvds will be out on the same day

Qissa @QissaTheFilm

(1/2) For the first time in India a movie is simultaneously releasing in theater, Video on Demand & DVD. Watch #Qissa on #cinemasofindia-

Qissa @QissaTheFilm

@prudhviraj87 Hi, Qissa is available for viewing only in India, Nepal, Bhutan & Sikkim due to territorial restrictions from other countries.

Qissa @QissaTheFilm

@prudhviraj87 We shall make Qissa available in other territories as & when we have distribution rights. It's now available on DVD too :)

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Nikki

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#10

Qissa Movie Review

Saibal Chatterjee | Thursday, February 19, 2015

Rating: 4 stars

Qissa Movie Review">

Genre:
Drama
Cast:
Irrfan Khan, Tillotama Shome, Tisca Chopra
Director:
Anup Singh

'Unique' and 'distinctive' are two words that repeatedly spring to mind as the contemplative, splendidly well crafted Qissa unfolds on the screen.

It touches upon a clutch of vital themes skillfully dovetailed into its Partition-era drama about a displaced Sikh family caught in a destructive spiral.

Qissa, with Punjabi dialogue and English subtitles, is writer-director Anup Singh's second film. In the manner of his first - The Name of a River, a memorable tribute to Ritwik Ghatak - Qissa is unlike anything that we have seen, or are likely to see, in years.

Singh's cinematic treatment of a cataclysmic event in the subcontinent's history that left behind poisoned hearts and wounded souls is both intensely meditative and unsettlingly shocking.

Jointly scripted by Singh and Madhuja Mukherjee, Qissa lays bare the enormous social and psychological corrosion that was caused by the communal violence that uprooted millions of people from their homes in 1947.

It does so via the story of a Partition victim whose acts of anguished desperation singe his own family, especially his wife, his youngest daughter, and an unsuspecting gypsy girl unwittingly drawn into the vortex.

Merging sturdy naturalism with whimsical strokes of surrealism, Singh paints a vast thematic landscape that takes in a wide array of issues - displacement, memories of loss, patriarchy, gender politics, obsession, delusion and a struggle for redemption amid festering self-inflicted wounds.

It might not be easy for many to penetrate the film's philosophical core and grasp its shifting tonalities. But the narrative at the heart of Qissa is simple enough for it to be able to reveal most of its layers to an attentive, open-minded viewer.

Qissa literally means "legend", and the fabular quality that Singh imparts to his story defines the film. The plot is presented as snatches recalled sometimes in tranquility, at others in a state of frenzy.

The narrator here is the male protagonist himself, Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan), who has fled his village on the Pakistan side of the new border to rebuild his life with his wife Meher (Tisca Chopra) and three daughters.

Umber yearns for a male heir but his wife bears him another daughter. Umber, in an act that sows the seeds of another severe dislocation, decides to treat the newborn as a boy and names her Kanwar.

Kanwar (Tillotama Shome) is raised as a man and is married to a gypsy girl Neeli (Rasika Dugal).

The forced suppression of the girl's gender identity takes on improbable proportions as she struggles to keep the attributes of womanhood at bay even as a mystified and cruelly shortchanged Neeli seeks ways of connecting with Kanwar.

The unlikely bonding that develops between Kanwar and Neeli becomes a bulwark against Umber's raging obsession with carrying the family lineage forward come what may.

Umber's son-fixation is a tragic metaphor for the bitter man's longing for the land that he can no longer return to. Both desires, one to defy biology, the other to overturn history, border on the ridiculous. But it is beyond Umber to see that.

While Umber is trapped in a muddle that is at least partly of his own making, the three women - Meher, Kanwar and Neeli - have to bear the brunt of both the forces of history and the unreasonable ways of an oppressive patriarch.

Qissa draws much of its power from the impressive widescreen sweep rendered to the images by German cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid.

But what towers over all else in Qissa is the subtlety of the performances that Singh extracts from a fine cast led by Irrfan Khan.

Playing a man teetering on the edge of insanity, Khan informs the character with nuanced qualities that make him an object of both dread and empathy.

Tillotama Shome's role is no less intricate, and making her cross-gender playacting convincing demands the utmost concentration. She brings Kanwar to life without missing a trick.

Rasika Dugal, as Neeli, is outstanding. She is strikingly restrained yet eloquently expressive.

In a world in the grip of growing religious intolerance and rampant sectarian violence, and in a country that still has to constantly remind itself of the need to save its daughters, Qissa has unmistakable resonance.

But the film is provocative poetry, and not preachy polemic, which makes it a true work of art.

Qissa is that rare cinematic treat that no genuine film lover should deprive himself/herself of.