Many were unaware of the largest civilian evacuation in history until director Raja Krishna Menon decided to narrate the incident through Airlift. By R Kaur
It’s been a while since Airlift director Raja Krishna Menon directed a film. His last film was Barah Aana which was “a purely cinematic experience” released in 2009. A comedy where a driver, watchman, and waiter accidentally stumble into a crime. The money for the film was raised independently with “no producer pressure”.
“The realisation from that film was that you need to make a film that you want to. It was made on a budget of `85 lakh and was again a truly independent film. The idea was to make people accept the independent cinema more. Plus, you’ll make the film you want to make but the realisation was that that is not the way to work,” Menon shared.
Barah Aana travelled the world till the end of 2010 and was screened at various festivals. But by the end of 2010, he wanted to direct something else.
“At that point, I wanted to make small independent films but there weren’t any producers. The films that I was being offered, I didn't know how to make them. I said if I'm not making the films that I want to then I will not. If I'm not having fun then, it's not a story which I want to tell and don't want to do it,” he told us adding that he then set up a production company.
He met producer Nikhil Advani through a common friend who asked him if he had a story that he really wanted to make and something that Bollywood would not. “I said I do have a film but I don’t think you guys are ready to make it as producers. I gave them a two-liner about this biggest evacuation in the history of the world and they were baffled and didn't believe me when I told them that this really had happened. People didn’t know about and that’s how it started,” he narrated.
He calls Airlift mainstream because “it is a story that resonates at a level which is mainstream.” “Outside of that, there is nothing different in the making of Barah Aana or Airlift. The concept of commercial compulsion have not entered my realm. What we’ve done is to tell the story as best as we can and that required a big star and let’s not deny that cinema is a commercial medium,” Menon said.
Airlift stars actor Akshay Kumar and The lunchbox actress Nimrat Kaur. It is based on a true story set in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait, leaving around 1,70,000 Indians trapped who were then evacuated.
Menon shared that Airlift was a very hard film made on a tight budget. The film was shot in the coastal town of Ras al-Khaimah near Dubai and Rajasthan.