Onir says he was ‘taken aback’ after seeing a scene from Zoya Akhtar’s Made in Heaven ‘shot exactly’ like his film I Am – bollywood

Filmmaker Onir has suggested that portions from his film I Am were lifted by director Zoya Akhtar and the team behind the Amazon Prime Video series Made in Heaven. Onir was reacting to a video that showed a side-by-side comparison between the two titles.

“I was quite taken aback when I saw that so much of that section of I AM was not only there as content but shot exactly in the same way. But acknowledgement has never been the strength of this industry,” he wrote on Twitter on Monday. The original tweet, which also contained the comparison video, read, “Did the makers of #MadeInHeaven ask/take permission/inform @Onir before lifting this sequence frame by frame from his National Award winning film #IAM ? Watch! Common actor in both.”

I was quite taken aback when I saw that so much of that section of I AM was not only there as content but shot exactly in the same way. But acknowledgement has never been the strength of this industry. https://t.co/ip2rzMQgC8

— Onir (@IamOnir) July 27, 2020

The common actor is Arjun Mathur, who played a homosexual man in both projects. His characters in the video are shown to be questioned by a cop who catches them engaged in sexual activity with another man. “Onir, why are you quiet. I do applaud your honesty, but I’d like to know why?” one person asked the filmmaker in response to his tweet. “They owe you an apology. (Which I know will never come!),” wrote another.

Made in Heaven, a drama about a couple of wedding planners in New Delhi, comes from Zoya and Reema Kagti. The show also stars Sobhita Dhulipala, Kalki Koechlin, Jim Sarbh, Shashank Arora and Shivani Raghuvanshi. I Am is an anthology film, released in 2010, starring Juhi Chawla, Manisha Koirala, Rahul Bose, Nandita Das and others.

Also read: Is Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy a copy of Eminem’s 8 Mile?

In a recent interview to India Today, Zoya had spoken about the ongoing nepotism debate in Bollywood, and had said, “If I have money, I am putting money on my son, this is nepotism? Then every industry there is nepotism. If I am a barber and I have a barber shop, am I going to leave it to my son or am I going to leave it to the best barber in the city? And that’s the bottom line.”

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