by Gill Pringle
With the tragedy of Christchurch fresh in people’s minds, there is talk that Australian film Hotel Mumbai has suffered an insurmountable blow to its cinema release. But with $1million already earned in less than one week, it seems that the film has overcome another obstacle that has plagued this Australian production’s course almost from the beginning.
During the Mumbai shoot of the film, Anthony Maras had his thumb sliced off by a fan in a restaurant, then its original US distributor The Weinstein Company was caught up in bankruptcy following its namesake’s sexual harassment controversy, and now the horrific events in Christchurch may hint at the film’s derailment.
Almost prophetically, according to director/co-writer Anthony Maras, the reason behind the Christchurch incident is exactly why he took on the project in the first place.
“I think the world is pretty divided at the moment and has been for a while, but it’s unfortunately increasing,” he told us at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. “And I think that the example set by the guest and staff coming together to try and get through this is a good example for us to know about.”
“I hope that audiences take away from the film what I got from the interviews of the survivors, which was, in aggregate, the idea that you had people from all walks of life coming together to survive the most horrific experience that you can imagine,” he continued. “What was in some respects unique here was because of what The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel is, because of what it stands for and because of the types of people that you find in that hotel; you have young waiters from the slums in there with hedge fund managers and when the bullets start flying all of those class divisions that were there are neutralised because they’re all in the same boat together.
“I think that we should look for difficult stories to tell because to relegate them to being too hard or too sensitive means that we don’t use it as a forum to get to the heart of really confronting things that we as people face.”
Hotel Mumbai is in cinemas now.
