Celebrated Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Salman Rushdie‘s 1981 Booker Prize winning novel Midnight’s Children features some of the most respected Bollywood acting talent, including the legendary Shabana Azmi and Anupam Kher. Director Deepa Mehta worked along Rushdie, who wrote the screenplay, voiced the narration and executively produced Mehta’s adaption, to make his contemporary classic come to life on the big screen.
If you haven’t read the book, Midnight’s Children follows the destinies of a pair of children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment that India claimed its independence from Great Britain — a coincidence of profound consequence for both. “Handcuffed to history,” and switched at birth by a nurse in a Bombay hospital, Saleem Sinai (Satya Bhabha), the son of a poor single mother, and Shiva (Siddharth), scion of a wealthy family, are condemned to live out the fate intended for the other. Imbued with mysterious telepathic powers, their lives become strangely intertwined and inextricably linked to their country’s careening journey through the tumultuous twentieth century.
The film releases nationwide in cinemas December 26th 2012.