On New Year’s eve, Anant Mahadevan received a gift-wrapped uterus in formaldehyde. “Initially, I thought, what the hell – is this guy tryin...
On New Year’s eve, Anant Mahadevan received a gift-wrapped uterus in formaldehyde. “Initially, I thought, what the hell – is this guy trying to bribe me because I gave him a job,” the actor and filmmaker recalled.
Presented by a crew member on his latest film Bittersweet, the gift was the best Mahadevan could have received. Only one sequence remained to be shot, that of a hysterectomy. “We actually rented an entire surgery theatre out of a hospital and staged it at a medical college that allowed us permission to shoot,” Mahadevan told Scroll.in. “We set it up entirely, even a real doctor. We had to shoot it very secretly, but that was the only graphic part of the film.”
The Marathi-language feature, starring Akshaya Gurav along with Suresh Vishwakarma, Anil Nagarkar, Guru Thakur, Asit Redij, and Vinayak Divekarsmita Tambe, is scheduled to be released in the first half of December. The film depicts the plight of female sugarcane cutters in Beed in Maharashtra. Thousands of labourers congregate every year in this region to seek jobs in its sugar manufacturing industry. In order to maintain strict control over the output for the six-month harvesting period, contractors and gynaecologists coerce women into undergoing hysterectomies.
