EXCLUSIVE | 'The Kerala Story' producer Vipul Shah: 'It became the highest-grossing female-centric film of all time, didn't approach any A-list actress because...'

Vipul Amrutlal Shah produced two films with Adah Sharma in 2023 and 2024- ‘The Kerala Story’ and ‘Bastar’, both based on real-life events that shook the nation.

“The Kerala Story” talks about a group of women from Kerala who are forced into converting to Islam and joining the Islamic State. Based on a true story, the film is premised on the Hindutva conspiracy theory of “love jihad” and claims that thousands of Hindu women from Kerala have been converted to Islam and recruited into the Islamic State.

It made over Rs 250 crore at the box-office in India and was the highest-grossing female-oriented film in Hindi cinema. As the film turned one, Vipul Shah spoke exclusively to Firstpost.

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Edited excerpts from the interview

What were your expectations when the film was released?

The answer to that is nobody in its wildest of dreams can expect a film to be a blockbuster of this proportion. It became the highest ever grossing film in the history of cinema in the female-centric films genre. Now, this cannot be predicted by anybody. However, the most important thing for us was to expose the truth. And there was a lot of opposition against this, and a lot of people were trying to discredit us.

But people saw through it, and people went in huge numbers to see the film. And even today, after two years, people talk about The Kerala Story. It was a massive success for Zee5, one of the highest viewed films on the platform. And wherever it goes, people connect with it, and people watch it in huge numbers. I mean, that’s the biggest success for the film, that people have found it to be an absolutely true depiction of the situation in those parts of Kerala. And I think that that is what matters the most.

What resonated with the audiences according to you?

What resonated with the audience, according to me, is the exposé and the truthfulness of it. People cannot be misguided by a smear campaign. People can see through the smear campaign. For example, a person like Dhruv Rathee made a video and in that he said that our numbers were all wrong. There were no 32,000 numbers. Even in the Kerala Assembly, the document that was presented was showing a number of 2,000 and not 7,000 plus. And when we made a video in the month of June, which is a 17-minute video available on YouTube, which gives you the full account of the number of 32,000, in which we have put the paper, which was an assembly record, where the number is 7,700.

We wanted Dhruv Rathee to react to it, but obviously he had shot and scooted. So he was not interested in engaging with us after what he had to do he had done. And people are smart enough to see through it. Nobody who are trying to call this film a lie. So people love the film for it having a complete true depiction of the picture of the serious problem that was happening in Kerala, that is still happening. And I think somewhere the pain of those girls connected with the audience, they could see their own daughters and sisters in that film. And that, I think, was the biggest reason why people connected with it.

Did you ever approach any A-list actress for this role?

I did not reach out to any Bollywood A-list actress, so it would be presumptuous of me to make any call whether they would or they would not. We wanted the film to look like all the actors playing characters should look like the characters and not the stars. And so we went ahead with the cast that we had.

What’s your take on the way Adah essayed this role?

Adah Sharma has shown extreme courage to play this role. We had told her at the time that there could be huge trolling on social media, losing some work, and all kinds of fears that were surrounding this film. But she connected with the character and so she decided to take it on knowing very well all the consequences. So a big shout out to her. It requires a lot of courage to put everything at stake and do something that you believe in.