Sooni Taraporevala, director of Little Zizou (2008) and writer of Salaam Bombay! (1988), Such a Long Journey (1998) and The Namesake (2006) is back with her second feature. Yeh Ballet stars Manish Chauhan and Achintya Bose as working-class teenagers who enroll in ballet school and encounter a performance form vastly different from anything they have done before.
The film is a fictionalised version of a short documentary of the same title and on the same subject. In the documentary version, Taraporevala follows young dancers Manish Chauhan, a taxi driver’s son, and Amiruddin Shah, a welder’s son, as they pursue their dreams of professional ballet. The feature version has been choreographed by Shiamak Davar, Cindy Jourdain and Vitthal Patil and scored by Ankur Tewari. Produced by Roy Kapur Films, Yeh Ballet will be out on Netflix on February 21.
The cast includes Vijay Maurya, Danish Husain, Jim Sarbh, Kalyanee Mulay and Julian Sands as the ballet teacher.
“A film like Yeh Ballet on a global service like Netflix will hopefully pique curiosity about the angelic mystique of ballet – but also demonstrate how dreams – no matter how outrageous, can be realised,” Taraporevala said in a press release.