Netflix’s latest Indian series Leila follows one woman’s search for her missing daughter. The six-episode series has been adapted from Prayaag Akbar’s 2017 novel of the same name by Urmi Juvekar (Shanghai, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!). The directors are Deepa Mehta, Shanker Raman and Pawan Kumar. The series will be premiered on June 14.
Shalini (Huma Qureshi) has a daughter, Leila, after marrying a Muslim man, Riz (Rahul Khanna). In a world in which Indians are made to live in ghettos and separated on the basis of caste, religion and income, Leila is presumably kidnapped for being a “mixed blood” child, the trailer suggests.
“India’s first dystopian story, Leila is set in an imagined world, Aryavarta, in which there is great suffering, extreme and totalitarian rules of engagement and fictional extremes constructed around an obsession with purity, communal and divisive societal dramas and grit,” a press release from Netflix stated. The cast includes Siddharth, Arif Zakaria and Ashwath Bhatt.
Leila is Netflix’s fourth original series after Sacred Games, Ghoul and Selection Day.
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