Filmmaker Sudhanshu Saria on Friday took to Twitter and accused Ekta Kapoor’s new ALTBalaji series His Storyy of plagiarism. The director, in a post, shared the posters of his film LOEV alongside the upcoming series and talked about how it has been “blatantly ripped off”.
In the same tweet thread, he said that the poster took “13 months of back and forth and so many drafts” to finish but it was “ripped off without any decency”. He wrote, “Am glad they liked our poster; am glad they’re telling a queer story but why do this? What is the need? We made our poster with no funds to speak of.”
WHY IS THIS INDUSTRY LIKE THIS?
Woke up to find that our painstakingly illustrated, original poster for @loevfilm has just been blatantly ripped off by the geniuses at @altbalaji @ZEE5Premium for their show #HisStoryy // Thread pic.twitter.com/ljQ9vNSa0a
— Sudhanshu Saria (@iamsuds) April 9, 2021
Saria apologised to his collaborators and artists for failing to protect their creation. In an Instagram post, he wrote, “Ashamed and angry. So disappointed about the pathetic state of intellectual property rights in our country. We really do need to do better.”
View this post on Instagram
Art director and film marketing strategist Jahan Bakshi also pointed out the similarity and tweeted, “We spent months on it. Investing solid time/money on a poster for an indie film is difficult. And yet, a studio which surely has the resources to commission original designs opts to steal it. Sad.”
Director Vikramaditya Motwane too, on Saturday, posted a series of Instagram stories criticising AltBalaji of plagiarising the posters and also said that it was shameful that rather than apologising for the “folly” the production house continued to display the poster on its social media.
Hours after this, the production house took to Twitter and issued a statement saying the resemblance between the two posters cannot be passed off as a “mere coincidence.”
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The statement read, “On the 9th of April, we released a poster of ‘His Storyy’ and were made aware of the existence of Sudhanshu’s ‘Loev’ poster. The uncanny resemblance and similarity cannot be written off as a mere coincidence. It has been an oversight on part of our design team. For this we apologise.”
The statement also assured that all the poster was deleted from all their social media platforms.
Helmed by Suparn S Varma, His Storyy features Satyadeep Mishra, Priya Mani Raj, and Mrinal Dutt in the lead and has been produced by Ekta Kapoor, Shobha Kapoor, and Tanveer Bookwala. The series, which will premiere on April 25, will delve into same-sex relationships.
LOEV, written and directed by Saria, also deals with the same subject. The film, which released in 2016, was screened at several festivals like Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, South By Southwest Film Festival, and also Mumbai International Film Festival. The film won the Audience Award for Best Feature Film at the 2016 Tel Aviv International Film Festival.