Mumbai, Nov 9 (IANS): Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi has come forward to lend his name to a unique effort in cinema. Satyarthi will officially collaborate with the childrens film "Jhalki", which addresses the issue of child labour, in a bid to screen the film for school kids in the interiors of the country using mobile digital movie theatre.
"Jhalki" features Sanjay Suri, Divya Dutta, and Tannishtha Chatterjee, and is directed by Brahmanand S. Siingh. Given the film's theme, the makers have taken into account the fact that the relevant film may not be available to many children and their parents in places with no cinema theatres.
So, Nobel Laureate Satyarthi has come forward to officially collaborate with PictureTime, a mobile digital movie theatre (MDMT) company, to screen the film in these remote areas.
" ‘Jhalki' is a beautiful story of a child and I feel this movie should go and reach every school of this country. When Brahmanand proposed that ‘Jhalki' could be the next MDMT release, we accepted and here we are going to go ahead with the collaboration and take this movie to all schools across India."said Sushil Chaudhary, CEO, PictureTime.
The story of the film revolves around a nine-year-old girl named Jhalki, who sets out on a journey to find her seven-year-old brother who has been kidnapped by a nexus of child slavery.
The film has travelled to several international film festivals and the poster of the film released at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.
The film has been backed by Kailash Satyarthi Children Foundation, an organisation by the child right activist that is constantly creating awareness on child issue and policy advocate.
"Jhalki" releases on November 14 simultaneously in theatre and on MDMT platform.
Emphasising on the importance of releasing the film on a MDMT platform, Sushil Chaudhary said: "India has a lot of entertainment dark spots, especially in the rural areas and tier-three cities but at the same time entertainment is loved, and people are very eager to watch new released films. Looking at the economic viability of the project, not too many theatres are coming up. So when I was designing the project, the idea was to cater to the rural parts of India and today we have done a lot of travelling across tier three cities of 14 states."