Bollywood to make Hitler film

Dear Friend Hitler, thought to be Indian cinema's first portrayal of the Nazi dictator, is set in the last days of the Third Reich
He is a stalwart of Indian cinema who once played Gandhi on the small screen, while she is a former Miss India best known for her romantic comedy roles. Together, Anupam Kher and Neha Dhupia are to play Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun in a new Bollywood film set in the last days of the Third Reich.

According to reports, the curiously titled Dear Friend Hitler will centre on the relationships between the Nazi dictator and those who were close to him, including Braun, his long-term lover who he married in his final days in the Berlin bunker. "It aims to take the viewer into close quarters with the enigmatic personality that Hitler was and give a glimpse into his insecurities, his charisma, his paranoia and his sheer genius," a source told the Mumbai Mirror newspaper.

Kher, who was chosen by the film's director, Rakesh Ranjan Kumar, for his apparent resemblance to Hitler, told reporters on Sunday that he was looking forward to the challenge. "I already have an image, I am a known actor, so it will be doubly hard work for me to take away that image," he said. "He's one of the most interesting characters of our times."

Kumar said he considered Hitler the most successful loser of the 20th century and wanted to examine this interpretation.

"As a leader, he was successful. Why did he lose as a human being, what were the problems, what were the issues, what were his intentions, this is what we want to show," he said. The aim is for the film to be an international release.

Perhaps controversially, Kumar also said he hoped to show Hitler's "love for India" and how the Nazi leader indirectly contributed to independence in the subcontinent. He said the movie would be neither a war story, nor a tale of love.

"The film will not show the love life of Adolf Hitler. It will show [the] Eva who had been rarely spoken about in history," Kumar told Indian news agency IANS. "Eva had been Hitler's girlfriend since she was 17 years old. The film shows how she comes into his life in his last days. They got married 42 hours before he died (30 April 1945)."

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Discovering oneself, key to contentment

By Anupam Kher.

As an actor with over 400 films in my repertoire, it has been my privilege to travel the world and meet several hundreds of people engaged in a wide spectrum of endeavours. From presidents to commoners, from billionaires to paupers. For me, this is not a privilege to be taken lightly as I enjoy meeting people. I also find it a very stimulating exercise to analyse them.
Actually, I find that I have a gift of analysing people. As I talk to them, I sometimes wonder what kind of lives they must be leading, what kinds of backgrounds they come from, the families they have raised and what makes them tick. Certainly, my calling as a trained actor has helped hone this process as understanding your character and getting under his skin makes your portrayal more convincing.
But for me, it has not stopped at analysing others. I have constantly tried to analyse myself and reinvent myself. You cannot be emoting the same way as say, a father, in 50 films. You have to be different and reinvent yourself. And that process begins only when you rediscover yourself.
That process of rediscovery for me began when I was contemplating my one-man play Kuchh bhi ho sakta hai some years ago. Here I was, a very successful actor if you count the number of films I had done.
And judging from critical acclaim, I was not doing too bad a job of it either.
For a boy who had grown up in the family of a lower division clerk in Shimla with dreams for company, I had fame and fortune beyond my wildest imagination.
And then, like it happens to most of us, the dreams got the better of me. I thought I had the Midas touch and nothing could go wrong. As was the fashion a decade ago, I too set up a huge production house to make ‘software’ for the industry.

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