Freedom at Midnight
Drama Hindi
Freedom at Midnight is the electrifying story of India's struggle for independence. Based on the bestselling book of the same name, it recounts the partition of India and Pakistan, and the religious and socio-political dynamics of the era.
| Cast: | Sidhant Gupta, Chirag Vohra, Rajendra Chawla, Arif Zakaria, Ira Dubey, Rajesh Kumar, Luke McGibney, Cordelia Bugeja, Malishka Mendonsa, K.C. Shankar, |
|---|---|
| Director: | Nikkhil Advani |
| Writer: | Abhinandan Gupta, Adwitiya Kareng, Gundeep Kaur, Divy Nidhi Sharma, Revanta Sarabhai, Ethan Taylor |
| Editor: | Shweta Venkat Mathew |
| Camera: | Malay Prakash |
All Guild Reviews of "Freedom at Midnight"
Fashions a High-Stakes Drama Built on One of the Most Tumultuous Chapters in Our History
“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom”. This momentous line from Jawaharlal Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech, delivered on the eve of India’s Independence on August 15, 1947, remains etched in the annals of history. What also remains an indelible part of our country’s birth into freedom after 200 years of colonial rule is the bloodied, agonising, gut-wrenching division of one nation into two.
Crafted With Utmost Diligence, the Show Gives History Its Due
Freedom at Midnight isn't driven by A-list stars but by actors who painstakingly and confidently flesh out the towering historical figures
In Freedom of Midnight, showrunner and director Nikkhil Advani, working with a script by a team of six writers, blends solid historicity with elements of fiction and imagination to bring to the screen the agonizing final leg of India’s freedom struggle. The SonyLIV drama series produced by Emmay Entertainment and StudioNext, is crafted with utmost diligence. It blends grandeur with intimacy, swept with precision, sustained gravitas with an acute awareness of the timeless contemporaneity of political decisions of far-reaching consequences made in an era of great upheavals by the architects of a free nation forged in fire.
A Brave and Bulky Historical Thriller
Nikkhil Advani’s 7-episode Partition drama is ambitious, campy and politically expressive.
As children, most of us learn to see 1947 as India’s finest moment. The event is simple: India gained freedom from the greedy British Raj and that’s that. As teenagers, we start to sense that perhaps it wasn’t all smooth and happy. With independence came the pressure to move out and grow up. But it doesn’t matter much because, either way, colonialism ended. As we get older, however, a full and bittersweet picture emerges: a nation is free, only to be violently divided into two on the basis of religion. It was never as simple as the British leaving or a newly born country celebrating its revolutionaries. This fuller picture has been molded — and revised — into shapeless stories by a future reeling from its scars. History is what happened, but these days, history is what we choose to believe.
A Poignant Reminder That Freedom Came at a Cost
Much of our history was unknown in 1975 when Freedom At Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, the bestseller documenting the backstage events that led to the bloody Partition of India, was first published. In recent years, there has been such a glut of printed and visual information on what happened in 1947 that Indians are familiar with most of the Nehru-Gandhi-Patel-Jinnah parleys which director Nikkhil Advani sets out to preserve on film.
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