Hasee Toh Phasee director Vinil Mathew’s next movie will be inspired by the experiences of merchant navy officer Audumbar Bhoi, whose ship and crew were attacked by Somalian pirates between Mombasa and the United Arab Emirates in 2010. The movie will be produced by former Disney India head Siddharth Roy Kapur through his company Roy Kapur Films and will be written by Sudip Sharma (NH10, Udta Punjab).
“The film is based on true events involving piracy on the Somalian high seas and is told through the eyes of a young Indian merchant navy officer, who has to navigate through unimaginably perilous circumstances, while dealing with huge personal challenges,” Kapur said in a press release.
According to a Mumbai Mirror report, “Audumbar, a budding writer himself, had pitched his story to a few writers at an entertainment conclave. Siddharth was clear that the story would have to be vetted by the many branches of the shipping industry as well as the merchant navy, and when the gravity of the issue, at its peak in 2010-2011, was verified, he decided to recreate it on screen.” The film will begin production in the second half of 2018.
Roy Kapur Films’ other projects include Mahesh Mathai’s biopic on Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian in space, Dangal director Nitesh Tiwari’s adaptation of Varun Agarwal’s 2012 debut novel How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-Founded a Million Dollar Company, a new film by Shubh Mangal Savdhaan director RS Prasanna, and a biopic of Vijendra Singh Rathore, a truck driver whose wife went missing in the Uttarakhand flash floods in 2013 and was found after a 19 month-long search.