Inside BAFTA and Academy Award entry – Gully Boy

Gully Boy, India’s official entry for the Academy Awards and a film entered for BAFTA film award categories including Best Director, Film Not in the English Language, Original Screenplay, Best Actor and Actress has been the talk of the town.

Gully Boy is directed by one of India’s leading female filmmakers Zoya Akhtar and produced by Ritesh Sidhwani & Farhan Akhtar’s Excel Entertainment and Zoya Akhtar’s Tiger Baby,

Gully Boy is inspired by true accounts and is refreshing cinema with a global appeal, portraying the triumph of the underdog and a celebration of diversity.

This feel-good factor film is set against the backdrop of the underground rap scene in the world’s largest slum, Dharavi, narrating a story where the power of hope and art trumps social hierarchy. Gully Boy is told through the lens of Murad (Ranveer Singh), an untypical 22-year-old Muslim boy from Dharavi who finds solace in rap music and his childhood sweetheart Safeena (Alia Bhatt) – an exceptionally bright hijab wearing girl with an equal defiance against stereotypes.

Together they will open a hidden world through rap music to show that being poor and Muslim in India needn’t mean even your dreams are colonized.

Given a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.2/10 mark on IMDb, Gully Boy received rave reviews and the loudest cheer at the Berlin Film Festival when it premiered. Cameron Bailey, the Artistic Director at the Toronto International Film Festival, lauded the film and tweeted that he had never seen such a response to a movie in the last 20 years at Berlin Film Festival. Gully Boy also won the NETPAC Award at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, Best Film Award at Indian Film Festival of Melbourne and Best Regional Film Award at Asian Academy Creative Awards.