1971 - A Movie Review

I was randomly scrolling through my YouTube feed and came across this movie called 1971. I’ve never heard of it, but the title said it was a national award winner and stars Manoj Bajpayee. These two things are enough to excite me, I checked IMDb and it has a rating of 8.2/10 (FYI anything above 8 is exceptional) but strangely only 84% rated on rotten tomatoes. Anyway, I decided to watch it and easily, this became one of the most hard-hitting war films I’ve ever seen.

The plot revolves around a group of Indian army personnel stuck in Pakistan as prisoners of war (POWs) after the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971. Pakistan refused to admit the presence of any POWs and shifted all the Indian POWs from jails all over the region to a military camp near the border so that any inspection carried out by the Red Cross organization wouldn’t reveal their lies. When the POWs get to know about this, they plan that some of them would escape from this camp and tell the Red Cross org about them and the conditions they were kept in.

I won’t reveal many details, you should watch it yourself. TBH it doesn’t even matter if you know the whole plot, it’s the acting and background score that will blow your mind. And the ending, what can I say, the ending shattered me completely, literally I was in a state of dark feeling I can’t even describe, all I was saying to myself was “Just stay for a minute, we made it”. Another reason to watch this film is the star cast, stuffed with phenomenal actors like Kumud Mishra, Deepak Dobriyal, and many more, each one of them gave justice to their character.

The sad part is it’s a true story and over 50 army personnel spent the rest of their lives in misery in jail and died. Everyone including India, Pakistan, and the UN knew about this but nothing saved them. Salute to every army officer. This movie was released in 2007 but the popularity it gained is criminal. I don’t know why no one loves this kind of real cinema, which shows reality. Recently another movie called Joram has been released, the same case here also, limited cinema halls and zero publicity. Bollywood needs to mature a lot.

Signing off, peace.