Shamoon Abbasi has endeavored something totally different with his full-length directorial debut Durj – a movie about cannibalism in Pakistan. Regardless of whether his film will make it or not, stays to be seen when the film releases in 2019 yet the trailer has surely managed to create a buzz.
Conversing with The Express Tribune, Shamoon Abbasi shared the motivation behind the storyline, expressing it depends on not one but rather three genuine incidents that occurred in Pakistan. “Two of them occurred in Punjab. One was about these two siblings (Arif and Farman) that dug more than 100 graves and ate corpses. Somehow they were getting away with the crime,” he said.
Sharing the horrendous details of such wrongdoings, Abbasi shared the fundamental issue dwells in the way that there is no law against cannibalism in our constitution.
“Even the police officer in charge was confused as to what they would make a case out of. They ended up with charging the brothers for ‘stealing from the graves’ and imprisoned them for two years. But they continued their crimes after being freed in two years.”
He shared the second case was of a group of cannibals that lived close to a burial ground and were caught while cooking a body. “The third one was in Karachi where a guy would dig out young girls’ bodies and rape them,” Abbasi said.
“All these horrific stories became a nightmare for me. And no one was talking about it. No one was concerned about this certain type of people who were doing it. So for me, the fact that there were no laws to handle this zombie-like phenomenon became a question. It made me want to make a film on this.”
“The point was to touch this subject and question why we didn’t have laws to punish these people in the constitution,” he added, confirming the film won’t include gruesome depictions of the cannibal acts.
“We must try to understand what made them do this to be able to punish them or have their medical records to understand what made them start in the first place. I did a lot of research and the most difficult part of this was to keep it balanced and not very violent. I think people in Pakistan would appreciate the other side of the film. As surprising as it sounds, Durj will also take you to a romantic side of the story. There can’t be just singing and dancing nor only violence. So we had to figure out how far we could go with our elements to balance them.”
In the trailer, we do see a few looks of it with co-producer and actor Sherry Shah and Shamoon Abbasi romancing in the mountains. Then again, we have the tale of Myra Khan, who plays a psychiatrist whose spouse has disappeared.
While the veteran actor is happy with the response to the trailer up until now, he clears up the film is made with constrained assets and “a small but enthusiastic team”. He stays sure that Durj will pull in moviegoers.
“I know that in the international film community, Durj can go very far. People are curious about this subject because it’s a global phenomenon that’s been around for a long time. Cannibalism has a long history. How people take it in Pakistan depends on how distributors and other elements are going to work with it. We are all set for Netflix release but before that, we want it to be distributed and experienced in cinemas around the world.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY4DF21KkQo
