Priyanka Banerjee’s short film Devi, featuring quite an eminent lot of accomplished actors including Kajol, Neha Dhupia, and Shruti Haasan has landed into controversy as a filmmaking student has levelled allegations of plagiarism against it. Abhishek Rai, a student of Asian Academy of Film and Television in Noida, has claimed it is identical to his five-and-a-half-minute film titled Four.
Devi features nine women from different strata of society living together and forming an unusual sisterhood over their shared trauma.
The concept seems to be inspired by Four, which featured three rape victims, instead of nine. The ending is similar, as well.
Abhishek mentioned in his post, “Here’s something I’d like to bring to everybody’s notice. We at AndaKurry Productions, made a short film when we were in film school, 2 years back called ‘FOUR’ that dealt with a premise of rape victims sitting together in a room when a new victim arrives. And yesterday, a film named ‘Devi’ was uploaded to LargeShortFilms’s YouTube channel that has heavy resemblance and the premise is also of the film we made.”
Abhishek mentioned nobody sought permission from him to make Devi, he was contemplating action against makers of the short film ‘Devi’.
Devi features also Neena Kulkarni, Mukta Barve, Sandhya Mhatre, Rama Joshi, Shivani Raghuvanshi and Yashaswini Dayama.
