Plaint against release of Jhund
A plaint has been filed in a court here seeking to restrain from exhibiting or broadcasting the Hindi movie Jhund, starring Amitabh Bachchan, in India and abroad and to stop uploading or streaming the film on ‘over the top’ (OTT) platforms. Hyderabad-based writerdirector Nandi Chinni Kumar approached the additional district court at Miyapur, complaining that the story of Jhund revolved around the life of Akhilesh Prakash Paul, the gangster-turned-footballer from Maharashtra.
He said he had made an agreement with Akhilesh in 2017 to make a film on his life. Akhilesh, a reformed gangster, became a football player and went on to lead India in the Slum Soccer World
Cup-2010 and eventually became a coach.
According to the petitioner, he had made agreements with Akhilesh in
2017 and 2018 and had paid him `17.50 lakh to bring his story on screen. He procured rights to produce and direct the feature film in any language.
Subsequently, Chinni Kumar readied the story and registered the film, tentatively titled ‘Slum Soccer’, with Telangana Cinema Writers Association in 2018.
Kumar informed the court that he had approached Bollywood and Hollywood production houses, including Reliance Entertainments and Viacom, and several of them evinced interest to collaborate and urged him to come up with a fullbounded script.
While the matter stood thus, he learnt from the media and his sources that Jhund was based on the core concept of slum soccer and allegedly based on some of the real-life incidents of Vijay Barse, the coach-mentor of Akhilesh.
Alleging that the film was made on the same story-line and complaining it to Akhilesh, who had assigned his true life story events in favour of third parties, on the basis of which someone had produced and released a Tamil movie Bigil based on a gangster-turned-football, the petitioner informed that he had filed a suit in the city civil court here against him, and makers of Bigil. Eventually, there was a compromise between the two parties.
In this petition, he mentioned Akilesh, Vijay Barse, Slum Soccer founder, Nagraj Manjule, producer and director of Jhund, Amitabh Bachchan, Netflix Entertainment Services India LLP, Amazon India and several others as defendants to the plaint.