When Raja Menon set out to make Airlift, which is based on the evacuation of Indians in Kuwait during the Iraq-Kuwait war, he had a stumbling block. They could find no documentation about this historical event and eventually realised that it was so because a lot of efforts were made to keep the story under wraps.
A determined Raja, however, managed to get to some of the real people who were involved in the operation. Their personal accounts aided him greatly to understand what had really happened during the war.
The Airlift team now wants to enlighten the audience about the history before they visit the theatres to watch the film that releases this week. They have already released three videos featuring the real people who Raja had interviewed for his research — Moortuza Borsadi, who was 15 back then, Michael Mascarenhas, who played a key role in evacuating Indians and Joanita Figredo, a nurse at the Jara hospital.
Joanita Figredo, a nurse at the Jara hospital.
The videos show them recalling the shocking incident and how they suffered during the blood bath. The videos are a part of the team’s Proud to be Indian campaign and the film’s leading man Akshay Kumar has shared the videos on his official social media pages.
Raja said, “These are the people who helped me in my research. It is through their version that I was able to bring out the correct facts. Now the world can know first hand experiences of what had happened. Before this, there wasn’t any document or a video about the war and the evacuation.”
Vikram Malhotra- founder and CEO of Abundantia EntertainmentVikram Malhotra from Abundantia Entertainment, one of the producers of the film elaborated on the idea. He said, “ Airlift has highlighted Independent India’s most heroic achievement to the forefront. Earlier if you google on world’s biggest evacuation, the search was not even more than a page. But today we have lakhs of pages and through these videos, the event has been brought out.”
