Veteran actor Shabana Azmi will play a role true to her real self in National Award winning director Sanjoy Nag’s film Good Morning Sunshine that features an all-woman star cast comprising Revathy, Rituparna Sengupta, Shweta Tripathi, Tejaswani Kolapuri. The film explores their relationship with an underlying theme of ‘Swachh Bharat’.
Shabana Azmi shot for the film at a tiny village near Varanasi, which is also close to the ancestral village of her father poet Kaifi Azmi. She says the film prioritises issues of open defecation, sanitation and construction of toilets and brought it into centre stage. She has worked in the slums of Mumbai and her Mijwan village, and has seen lack of toilets in both the places, and has personally tried to ensure that toilets were constructed through her MPLADS fund.
Says Shabana, “When the director Sanjay Nag narrated the film theme and my cameo in the film, I realised that my dialogues were more or less what I would say in reality. Girls are dropping out of school, women are forced to get up and go to the fields where they are subjected to rape, kidnapping and such heinous crimes.”
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Shabana Azmi also maintains that the very nature of the films she chose, helped her fight social injustice and some of her characters did affect her real life, a combination of her upbringing, and the kind of roles she chose.