''The Tashkent Files – Who Killed Shastri?'' is a
2019 Indian Hindi-language
thriller film about the death of former
Prime Minister of India
The prime minister of India (ISO 15919, ISO: ) is the head of government of the Republic of India. Executive authority is vested in the prime minister and his chosen Union Council of Ministers, Council of Ministers, despite the president of ...
Lal Bahadur Shastri; written and directed by
Vivek Agnihotri. The film stars
Shweta Basu Prasad,
Naseeruddin Shah,
Mithun Chakraborty
Mithun Chakraborty (born Gouranga Chakraborty; 16 June 1950) is an Indian actor, film producer, screenwriter, entrepreneur and politician who predominantly works in Hindi cinema, Hindi and Cinema of West Bengal, Bengali cinema. In a career spa ...
,
Pankaj Tripathi,
Pallavi Joshi,
Prakash Belawadi and
Mandira Bedi. It was released on 12 April 2019 to negative reviews but emerged as a box-office
sleeper hit and received two
National Film Awards
The National Film Awards are awards for artistic and technical merit given for "Excellence within the Cinema of India, Indian film industry". Established in 1954, it has been administered, along with the International Film Festival of India ...
.
Plot
A young journalist, Raagini Phule, whose career is threatened and looking for a
scoop receives help from an anonymous informer which leads to the formation of a panel of experts by the government, which also includes Raagini, to investigate the truth about the mysterious death of India's former
prime minister
A prime minister or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. A prime minister is not the head of state, but r ...
Lal Bahadur Shastri. The collected information is scrutinised and debated over by the panel in an attempt to unravel the truth.
Cast
Production
The film was announced in January 2018 as India's first "crowd-sourced" thriller.
Principal photography began in January 2018.
In February 2018 he invited from the public any information, book, link or memory related to
Lal Bahadur Shastri’s
mysterious death in
Tashkent
Tashkent (), also known as Toshkent, is the Capital city, capital and List of cities in Uzbekistan, largest city of Uzbekistan. It is the most populous city in Central Asia, with a population of more than 3 million people as of April 1, 2024. I ...
to help him solve the 'decades old enigma' surrounding the death of former Prime Minister of India.
Books referenced for and referred in the film include ''Political Mysteries'' by
K. R. Malkani, ''Conversations with the Crow'' by Gregory Douglas, and
Mitrokhin Archive by
Vasili Mitrokhin.
Marketing and release
First poster was released on 19 March 2019, and on the same occasion, the release date was announced as 12 April 2019.
The film was also simultaneously released on
video on demand
Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos, television shows and films Digital distribution, digitally on request. These multimedia are accessed without a traditional video playback device and a typica ...
service
ZEE5. Agnihotri touted the film to be the first instalment of his trilogy of "untold stories of independent India", which is followed by ''
The Kashmir Files
''The Kashmir Files'' is a 2022 Indian Hindi-language drama film written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri. The film presents a fictional storyline centred around the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Hindus from Indian-administered Kashmir. It depicts ...
'' (2022) and an upcoming film ''The Delhi Files''.
Reception
Critical response
''The Tashkent Files'' received overwhelmingly negative reviews. On
review aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews and ratings of products and services, such as films, books, video games, music, software, hardware, or cars. This system then stores the reviews to be used for supporting a website where user ...
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator, review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee ...
, the film holds a 0% approval rating based on 8 reviews.
Devesh Sharma of ''
Filmfare'' gave two and half stars out of five; it was a 'melodramatic' episode with loud and over the top acting coupled with bombastic dialogues. Sharma found the film to be biased against a certain political party and wondered about its release during the national elections, which were running concurrently.
Writing for
Scroll.in, Nandini Ramnath found it to be a politically motivated work that did not have any rigor and failed to be an effective conspiracy thriller.
Saibal Chatterjee, writing for ''
NDTV'' rated the film with half star out of five — the research that went into the production was equivalent of a Google search film-making and overall, it was "junk."
Jyoti Sharma Bawa, reviewing for the ''
Hindustan Times'' rated it one out of five stars and reiterated Chatterjee. ''
Mid-Day'' gave one and a half stars out of five — all the research that went into the work was derived from internet, esp. social media.
A review over ''
India Today'' rated it one out of five stars and noted it to be a politically motivated film that did not have any logic and might be easily dispensed with. A review over ''
The Hindu
''The Hindu'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It was founded as a weekly publication in 1878 by the Triplicane Six, becoming a daily in 1889. It is one of the India ...
'' noted it to be an ideological slideshow that exploited Shastri's death to attack left, secular and socialist ideologies and institutions and though based on an engaging topic, was a 'hotch-potch of hearsay, juvenile arguments' that ultimately lend to utter confusion rather than any conviction. Another review over ''
News18 India'' rated it one out of five stars and noted it to be a politically motivated film with unconvincing arguments, that made for a dull watch.
A review in ''
The First Post'' asserted it to be a politically motivated film and rated it two out of five stars. Noting Agnihotri to neither have the finesse nor the potency to sketch a conspiracy thriller, the reviewer deemed it to be a cheap trick, that was high on hysteria but lacked logic amidst a focus-less frenzied storytelling that did not venture beyond the realms of Google. A review in ''
The Indian Express
''The Indian Express'' is an English-language Indian daily newspaper founded in 1932 by P. Varadarajulu Naidu. It is headquartered in Noida, owned by the ''Indian Express Group''. It was later taken over by Ramnath Goenka. In 1999, eight y ...
'' deemed it to be the ideal politically-motivated fiction for the 'post-truth, fake news era' — a series of eye-roll moments with unintentionally hilarious dialogues. ''
ThePrint'' found it to be a shoddy jab at film-making that harnessed a mish-mash of unformed characters and incomplete plots devoid of logic. ''
Bollywood Hungama'' gave one and a half stars out of five.
Anusha Iyengar, reviewing for ''
Times Now'', gave two out of five stars, praising the story but taking issues with over-the-top dramatization that reeked of amateurish storytelling.
Manavi Kapur, reviewing the film at ''
Business Standard'', found it unworthy for even a daytime opera slot. Shilajit Mitra, reviewing for ''
The New Indian Express
''The New Indian Express'' is an Indian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper published by the Chennai-based Express Publications. It was founded in 1932 as ''The Indian Express'', under the ownership of Chennai-based P. Varadarajulu Naidu ...
'' remarked it to be an exhausting head-spin of a political propaganda, that became weirder with time. Stutee Ghosh of ''
The Quint'' found it to be a prejudiced, amateurish and cringe-worthy film with an uninspiring storytelling that banked on crowd-sourced research; she rated one star out of five.
Box office
The film became a box-office
sleeper hit.
Accolades
Soundtrack
The music of the film is composed by
Rohit Sharma while the lyrics are penned by Aazad, Rohit Sharma and
Vivek Agnihotri.
''Who Killed Shastri?''
''Who Killed Shastri?: The Tashkent Files'' is a non-fiction book by director Vivek Agnihotri about his research for the film and outlines various theories about the
death of Lal Bahadur Shastri. It was released in August 2020 by
Bloomsbury India.
References
External links
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tashkent Files, The
Indian thriller films
2010s Hindi-language films
2010s Indian films
2019 thriller films
2019 films
Cultural depictions of prime ministers of India
Cultural depictions of Lal Bahadur Shastri
Cultural depictions of Indian people
Films directed by Vivek Agnihotri
Hindi-language thriller films
Films about conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theories in India
Films adapted for other media
Indian film series