After a lot of controversies for its alleged similarity with another upcoming film, Ujda Chaman, filmmaker Amar Kaushik's film Bala starring Aushman Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar is all set for a countrywide release tomorrow.
And no one is more excited than Bhumi Pednekar. The actor, who is getting rave reviews for her convincing portrayal of sharpshooter Chandro Tomar in the biographical movie, Saand Ki Aankh that released a couple of weeks ago, will be seen yet again in a very different role --- that of a dark-skinned girl fighting social prejudices.
"Bala is about the importance of self-love," tells Bhumi Pednekar, who plays Latika, a dark-skinned yet beautiful orphaned girl, who lives with her aunt.
While Ayushmann Khurrana battles premature balding, Bhumi battles en societal stereotype attached to dark-skinned women in the country. "I realised from my first film that the kind of cinema I really like being a part of, has to be entertaining, fun, quirky, it really needs to take my audience through a journey full of emotions but at the same time it needs to leave them with a thought and this is the precise reason why I selected Bala. My character deals with the colour bias that exists in our country,” tells Bhumi.
Revealing the details about her character, she tells us, "Latika is very confident but people around make her feel she is incomplete. To feel how obsessed we are with fair-skinned people, you need to look around and see advertisements of fairness creams and matrimonial ads harping at the need of a fair girl”.
Bhumi wants to fight this petty mindset that the society harbours for women with a dark complexion. “Our society has set such wrong benchmarks about the definition of beauty. So, when I read Bala's script I could instinctively connect with it,” she recalls.
Bhumi further adds, ”My character Latika is a lawyer. But since she was a child, people teased her for her colour and humiliated her. The whole idea of ugly being associated with the word dark is something the film will try and demolish,” tells Bhumi.