The Gang Rape Scene in Bandit Queen

Udayan asked : When I watched Bandit queen and perticularly the scene where She was being gang raped. I almost throwed up during that scene and took me about a week to get over it. How did you managed to film that scene? I mean the intensity that you put into that scene simply can’t be just direction!


Udayan, any film maker that can tell u exactly how he/she planned to execute a scene is either lying or was being completely dishonest about the shooting of the scene. I merely locked myself in a room and tried to imagine what being raped was being liked. I went into myself and realized that the body, the mind and the soul must escape the body to escape the utterly humiliating and defiling act.
So I went for that. To shoot the whole thing in a surreal fashion _ as if it was the mind was trying to escape the body.
If u look carefully though the scene is put together in a series of close ups intercut with the opening and closing fo doors. When I was filming I kept throwing up because I was recalling the emotions that I was experiencing imagining myslef being raped. The crew could not understand – for what they saw was me shooting a lot of close ups and opening and closing of doors.
I wanted to stop filming, and it was ony my DP Ashok Mehta who insited that I kept filming.
I have said this in press before, and got a lot of flak from feminists who ask how I dare say that as a man I can somewhere understand what rape feels like for a woman. I disagree. I am hoping that underneath our sex we are all human. It is a human being that I was experiencing being raped. Morover the making of Bandit Queen made me much more comfortable with my feminine self. As all of us are both feminine and masculine in different degrees.
It was the feminine self in me that felt the force of that violation.
Shekhar

102 thoughts on “The Gang Rape Scene in Bandit Queen

  1. this is no shekar kapoor guys…just a fake…ive met and heard shekhar kapoor….look at the english this guy has used…do you expect this shit from someone who made elizabeth…..

  2. This is the most idiotic answer I have ever read in my life. You imagined how it would be to be raped and then went ahead filmed it? Either you are not the real Shekhar Kapoor or if you are then either you are crazy or high all the time. What is wrong with you? You can get as comfortable with your masculine or feminine sides but dude don’t ever think that imagining something horrendous as gang rape makes it legit to actual know or experience what it is. You used that to sell your film. There wasn’t any truth in your film-making because there was no truth in the process. You never even met her! Just by constantly saying that ‘this is a true story’ by no means makes it or YOU truthful.

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