Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi is the story of three characters whose lives intertwine across a decade. It is a love story set against the backdrop of a politically decaying India from the late sixties to the late seventies, often described as the Indira Gandhi years.

Produced by Pritish Nandy Communications and directed by Sudhir Mishra, the film is an Indo-French co-production with a French technical crew. The actors are among the best new talents from alternative cinema in India today. The script has been awarded the Fond Sud from the French government and the film has received the Montecinema Verita Fund.

Pandit Nehru made a horological mistake. At the stroke of midnight when India awoke to “light and freedom”, the world was not asleep. It was for instance, around two thirty in the afternoon in New York.

Anyway, my father’s generation loved him and wanted to believe in his dream and that we had a tryst with destiny. I did too. By the time my elder brothers and sisters (not that i had any) went to college in the late sixties, Nehru had died and his dream had soured.

The baton had passed into the hands of his daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi. This is the story of my imaginary siblings’ lives in those times…when India was being pulled in a thousand directions.

Sudhir Mishra

This is a film about politics, passion, ambition. Three amazing people, each in search of their own destiny. Captured against the backdrop of the notorious Emergency years.

You see here the agony and ecstasy of a nation in search of its identity. Post Independent India trying to strike a balance between tradition and change, colonization and freedom, the tyranny of conflicting political choices, each bringing with it its own rhetoric of rage. Sudhir Mishra captures it all in an amazing film that you can easily describe as India’s first serious political epic.

But that is not where the film stops. In many ways this is also an intimate film. It is a film about relationships. About passions that run deep and occasionally wild. It is about the dreams, ambitions and hopes of young people. About a world that we all yearn for, where nothing is impossible to achieve.

I hope it will not only showcase the talent of one of India’s finest living film makers but also bring centrestage three truly amazing new actors: Chitrangda, Kay Kay Menon and Shiney Ahuja. PNC is proud to present one of its finest productions: Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi.

Pritish Nandy