Nitesh Tiwari's Bawaal, starring Janhvi Kapoor and Varun Dhawan, has landed itself in controversy internationally.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC), a Jewish human rights NGO dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, has written an open letter to Prime Video, seeking the film's removal from the streaming platform.
The organisation has accused Tiwari's romantic drama of trivialising the "suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust".
According to a report by The Indian Express, the organisation said in their statement, "Directed by well-known Indian filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari, the film’s storyline, which is set in contemporary times, leads to scenes in which the protagonists enter a gas chamber in Auschwitz and are suffocated while wearing striped clothing. Hitler is used as a metaphor in the movie for human greed, with the main protagonist saying to his wife, ‘We’re all a little like Hitler, aren’t we?’"
Condemning Tiwari and his film, SWC's Rabbi Abraham Cooper shared in the open letter, "Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is the quintessential example of Man’s capacity for Evil. By having the protagonist in this movie declare that ‘Every relationship goes through their Auschwitz,’ Nitesh Tiwari trivialises and demeans the memory of 6 million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler’s genocidal regime.
"If the filmmaker’s goal was to gain PR for their movie by reportedly filming a fantasy sequence at the Nazi death camp, he has succeeded. Amazon Prime (Prime Video) should stop monetising Bawaal by immediately removing this banal trivialisation of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust," he added.
Soon after its release, Bawaal drew mixed reactions on social media for its far-fetched and insensitive parallel between the protagonists' romance and the tragedy of World War II.
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