Court (2014) on Netflix

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Court (2014)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

• Vira Sathidar, who played the protest singer Narayan Kamble, was hidden by the crew when members of the Anti-Terrorism Squad came to the set looking for a Naxalite from Nagpur; they had mistaken Sathidar, a human rights activist, for one, and the crew feared his arrest would stop the shoot.
• The film's story was inspired by the case of Jiten Marandi, a cultural activist from Jharkhand who was arrested as a suspect in the 26 October 2007 Chilkari massacre, in which nineteen people were killed by Naxalites at a public function, only because his name was similar to the real suspect's; he was tried and released in 2016 after being found not guilty.
• Nearly 1,800 people auditioned over nine months for Court, and about 80 percent of the cast were non-professional actors who had never been filmed; Tamhane and his crew recruited them from banks, railway offices, schools, tea sellers and taxi drivers, an idea he borrowed from Abbas Kiarostami.
• Because shooting inside a real courtroom is not allowed, the production built court sets; Tamhane and casting director Sachit Puranik sneaked into the Bombay High Court and stayed there almost three hours a day to observe real proceedings and take notes on surroundings and costumes.
• India's Central Board of Film Certification gave Chaitanya Tamhane the choice of cutting or muting a line of dialogue from Court, and he decided to mute it.
• Tamhane shot long takes with no cuts and no improvisation, so the inexperienced non-professional cast needed 30 to 35 takes on average, with some scenes taking 60, and only one scene could be shot per day.
• While writing the script, Tamhane kept the public prosecutor as a man for a long time but felt the film was "too male" with every main character male, so he changed the prosecutor into a woman.