Supreme Court to hear plea for bar on ‘Kerala Story’

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear on May 15 a petition challenging an order of the Kerala high court refusing to stall the screening of the film ‘The Kerala Story’, which was released on May 5 and subsequently withdrawn from theatres in Tamil Nadu and banned in West Bengal.
Accepting the request of senior advocate Kapil Sibal, a bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justice P S Narasimha slotted the special leave petition for hearing on Monday.
A division bench of Kerala HC on Friday had heard a bunch of petitions seeking interim stay on the screening of the film till their petitions challenging the censor board certification were decided. It refused interim stay saying, “Going through the trailers of the movie, we find that trailers don’t contain anything offensive to any particular community as a whole. The fact remains that the petitioners have not watched the movie. We find that a competent statutory body, Central Board of Film Certification, has found that the film is suitable for public exhibition.’’

The film production house, Sunshine Pictures Private Limited, had informed the HC that the pre-release teaser of the film had been withdrawn from social media and that a disclaimer is being shown prior to the screening of the movie to the effect that the film has been fictionalized and is a dramatised version of events and that it does not claim accuracy or factuality of historic events.
The HC had said, “In view of the disclaimer and taking into consideration that the producer would remove the teaser from social media, we are not inclined to pass an interim order restraining producer from exhibiting film.