Priyanka Chopra loves to play Bengali characters
Kolkata, March 5 – A year after receiving critical acclaim for portraying Jhilmil Chatterjee, an autistic Bengali girl, in “Barfi”, National Award winner Priyanka Chopra feels elated at her second outing as a Bengali character in the forthcoming film “Gunday”.
“I think Bengali girls are beautiful and bold and I love playing bold and beautiful girls. I am very happy to be playing Bengali characters,” she said at a media conference here Tuesday.
Priyanka was in the city to shoot her “Gunday”, an action-drama cum romance written and directed by Ali Abbas Zafar and produced by Aditya Chopra.
The film, also featuring Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor in lead roles and slated for a release later this year, is based in Kolkata and revolves around two small-time thugs or “gundays” who get involved with the coal mafia.
“My character is a Bengali girl, she is called Nandita. We must not talk so much about the film right now. We are very very far from release. It is just just the beginning.
This is one of our first few schedules. Slowly once we are done with the film, we will unfold a lot more about it,” said Priyanka.
Gunday
Gunday (transl. Outlaws) is a 2014 Indian Hindi-language gangster thriller film written and directed by Ali Abbas Zafar and produced by Aditya Chopra. The film features Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra and Irrfan Khan in the lead roles. Set in 1971–1988 Calcutta, Gunday is a story about two best friends and outlaws, who fall in love with a cabaret dancer, which causes rivalry and misunderstandings between them.
Zafar conceived the film as an amalgam of stories he had heard from his father as a child about the effects of war-caused immigration and the Mafia Raj’s illegal marketing of coal. He wrote the film as a tale of the consequences of the struggle of two outlaws against the system, using his father’s stories as a backdrop for the characters. Principal photography began in Mumbai in December 2012 before moving to Kolkata, where extensive filming was done. The soundtrack was produced by Sohail Sen and the lyrics were penned by Irshad Kamil. It was the last Yash Raj Film narrated to Yash Chopra.
Gunday was released on 14 February 2014, receiving positive reviews and commercial success, with a box-office gross of â‚ą1.2 billion making it the 10th highest-grossing Bollywood release of 2014. The film won the Best Action at the 60th Filmfare Awards and was nominated for Best Choreography for the song “Tune Maari Entriyaan”.
Despite positive reception from critics, Gunday became a victim of vote brigading on the Internet Movie Database and it was one of the website’s lowest-rated films. This was a result of a social-media campaign by Bangladeshis, who urged their fellow countrymen to “bury the film” because of a historical inaccuracy in its opening narration.
3/5/2013 – ians
