Bhumi Pednekar: Bala is about self-respect and self-love

Bhumi Pednekar is currently busy garnering praises for her performance in Saand Ki Aankh. She will next be seen on the big screen in Bala in which he plays the role of a dark-skinned girl. The actress has stated that the film is giving out a loud message about the importance of self-respect and self-love.

While talking about what made her say yes to the film, the actress said, “I realised from my first film that the kind of cinema I really like being a part of, has to be entertaining. It has to be 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.”

Giving some details about her character, Bhumi stated, “She is a dark-skinned but extremely beautiful girl. She is very confident, she is everything, she is perfect. But people around make her feel like she is just not complete because of the lack of awareness that our country has. Just the obsession with fair-skinned people - I mean if you look around you will see advertisements of fairness creams, if you look at matrimonial ads - there is a constant need of a fair girl, they need a girl who is thin, tall and obviously fair. As a society, we have set such wring benchmarks, these incorrect moulds about the perfect definition of beauty. And I have personally taken it upon myself to break the definition of beauty because beauty is very subjective. It is very unique to each person. God has made each of us differently and we need to accept ourselves. And that is what Bala is about. The movie is about self-respect and self-love and when I read about the script there was something that instinctively connected with me.”

She further added, “My character Latika, she is an orphaned and lives with her aunt. Her aunt is a very open-minded person but I think Latika is just a confident girl who always has her defences up. She is a lawyer. The reason she is like this is because ever since she was a child, people teased her for her colour and she has been called names and humiliated her by saying really derogatory things. I think that is why she has taken it upon herself in the film to kind of set things straight in this really flawed society. The whole idea of ugly being associated with the word dark is something the film will try and demolish.”

Also starring Ayushmann Khurrana and Yami Gautam, Bala is slated to release on 7^th November 2019. It is directed by Amar Kaushik who had last year helmed Shraddha Kapoor and Rajkummar Rao starrer Stree.