Khuda Haafiz on digital platform
Faruk Kabir started as assistant director in the Shahrukh Khan starrer Asoka when he was a mere 18 years old. His hard work paid off, and he turned full-fledged director with the Ajay Devgn-starrer Awakening. He rose to fame with Allah Ke Bande, and now his next, Khuda Haafiz is releasing on Disney Hotstar next Friday.
For Faruk, filmmaking is both an art and a craft. “When I’m writing, it’s all about art. When I’m on the set’s, it’s all about execution,” he says. “I want to be an original story teller,” he asserts, adding, “It’s about choosing the right stories to tell.”
He has got a reputation for portraying current issues on celluloid and explains that his endeavour is to translate the emotions of an event on to the screen, so that his audience experiences the same impact.
So is Khuda Haafiz based on real life too? “Yes,” says the director-writer. Faruk refutes the suggestion that titles like Allah Ke Bande and Khuda Haafiz indicate that his films are religion-centric. “In 2019 I made a film titled 377 Ab normal on the LGBT community’s struggles,” he points out. He explains that Khuda Hafiz was derived from a line of dialogue by Anu Kapoor – ‘Himmat mat harna Sameer Khuda Haafiz hai tumhara.’ “Allah ke Bande also came from the words of a character in the story – Arre kya darna, hum log to Allah ke bande hai”, he adds.
Asked what is unique about Khuda Haafiz, he tells it was shot with an Anamorphic lens (a technique of shooting a widescreen picture), which was earlier used in Sholay. Though he had wished for a theatre release, keeping in mind the current time, he was happy the film was getting a digital release.