Dibakar Banerjee on his shelved film ‘Tees’: ‘Not so futuristic after all’

Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees bravely tackles dystopian futuristic cinema – a tricky genre in a country in which the imagined terrors of the future have often already been overtaken by the actual horrors of the present. The events envisaged in Banerjee’s triptych of stories spanning three generations of a Kashmiri family have not only caught up with its characters, but with the movie itself.

Although Tees was announced as a Netflix original title five years ago, it is nowhere on the streaming platform. After the movie was completed in 2022, Netflix shelved the release, sending Tees into the same state of limbo in which one of its key characters floats.

A press release on Netflix’s website from 2019 mentions the film but says that it is called Freedom. The synopsis says: “Directed and produced by Dibakar Banerjee, it is the story of an Indian family interwoven with the personal, ideological and sexual history of India and how desire plays a common role in each.”

According to a report in the American trade publication Deadline from February 2023, “Netflix confirmed it has no plans to release the feature, but has not commented on the reasons for shelving it…Netflix confirmed that it has given Banerjee permission to send links of the film to potential buyers, but the...

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