Call for Signatures

Hello, my name is Raj Amit Kumar. While I was making the film Unfreedom, I never thought that I would be making a petition letter. But it has become necessary…

I grew up in a small town in India where I saw people killing each other in the name of religion. I saw sexual oppression in the name of religion. We see that today, we see it all around the world and we definitely see it in India. I decided to make my first film about these unfreedoms so that we could initiate a dialog to bring an end to such religious intolerances and injustices.

In order to get the movie made I took the story to people I didn’t know. I took the script to Bafta nominee Victor Banerjee, Life of Pi’s Adil Hussain, Oscar winning sound designer Resul Pookutty and national award winning cinematographer Hari Nair. They all came behind the film not because I had any money to give them but because they believed in the story. Because they believed that it was an important film to be made. I believed that as well. The whole process of making Unfreedom was a very personal journey for me. After half a decade, this tumultuous journey was about to come to a culmination and the movie was set to release in India and USA. But very recently the guardians of censorship in India decided to ban it and suddenly the journey that was very personal to me turned into something else. It turned into something even more important. Something that is important to all of us. It is about our basic human right of freedom of speech and expression.

There cannot be any censorship authority which stops any filmmaker from expressing. There can be a body that informs people of age restrictions but there cannot be any censorship.

It is hard to understand how we can let a few people decide for over a billion people in India what we should say and what we should see. It is hard to understand how we film-makers have accepted to be treated like criminals, because the moment we make a film we have to go to a jury to prove our innocence. It is hard to understand how we can let censorship stop us from having discussions, debates and conversations which are important for a society to transform.

It is a long battle ahead of all of us and I believe there are billions out there who want to save freedom of expression as much as we do.

We are starting a petition campaign and the petition says one simple basic thing: There cannot be any censorship authority which stops any filmmaker from expressing himself. There can be a body that informs people of age restrictions but there cannot be any censorship.

We need your support. We want thousands and thousands of people to sign this petition. As the petition builds we will march and physically hand them over to the censorship authorities. We will repeat this process over and over until there is a real change.

If there is one right that is most fundamental, it is our right to speak. No matter who it offends and No matter who it insults. There is no freedom of speech and expression if there are restrictions to it. It is one freedom that should be absolute and worth dying for.

I thank you very much and please sign and share this petition. We all can only do this together.

Petition

Petition Against Censorship of Films in India

Petitioning the Prime Minister of India

Petition by Mr. Raj Amit Kumar and the People of India and the World.

“If there is one right that is most fundamental, it is our right to speak. No matter who it offends and No matter who it insults. There is no freedom of speech and expression if there are restrictions to it. It is one freedom that should be absolute and worth dying for.”
– Raj Amit Kumar

This petition is to preserve our right to absolute freedom of speech and expression in cinema by abolishing the Censor board and establishing a new body that is authorized only to rate a film for age restrictions based on its content. We, the People of India and the World, sign this petition to save freedom of speech from any interference and we demand that the Prime Minister of India issue a directive to the Censor Board to respect freedom of speech of all Indians to the extent that:

“There shall be no law that abridge the freedom of speech and expression, and everyone should have the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and without any interference, regardless of frontiers.”

supporters

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