Poorna: Courage Has No Limit is based on the real life story of Malavath Poorna, an Indian mountaineer from Telangana, who is the youngest girl to climb Mount Everest. She was 13 when she scaled the highest peak in the world. This film is directed by Rahul Bose, who also plays the role of Dr RS Praveen Kumar, the man who identified her talent. [caption id=“attachment_3356556” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] A still from Poorna. Image from Facebook[/caption] Aditi Inamdar has essayed the role of this young mountaineer in this film, who climbed Mount Everest on 25 May 2014 and pitched a flag on the summit at 6 am. Interestingly, Inamdar too, hails from Telangana. The film was shot in Malavath’s village in 11 days, and Inamdar was picked from among 109 other girls who auditioned for the role. Despite not starring any A-listers, Bose is convinced that the film is not a small one. “This is going to be a very big movie commercially, I can bet on that. So, I never had this doubt (whether it will get released or make money),” he said , adding that he credits its potential to the story it is based on, which he called phenomenal. He added that he felt shame when he heard her story and realised that he had never heard of Poorna. The film has 70 shots from Poorna’s expedition which were hitherto unreleased, and which the creators had to struggle to acquire from the only Indian with her, Hemant Sachdev. Bose said that this film was a difficult one to shoot because of the locations. “We started at 40-45 degrees in Pakala village from a hut, where Poorna grew up and then we moved to Bhongir, 650 feet above sea level, where one shot would take one and half to two hours,” he said . The other locations featured in this film are Darjeeling, Sikkim and Nepal. Rahul Bose said that he went into a “creative cave” while working on the film, and did not reveal this fact to anyone for 14 months, fearing that someone else would use the idea. The music for this film has been produced by Salim-Sulaiman because Bose wanted it to be “soulful”. The lyrics have been written by Amitabh Bhattacharya and sung by Arijit Singh. The music album was launched by maestro Zakir Hussain. When both the real life and reel life Poornas were shown the film at a special screening, Malavath was reportedly moved to tears. “Seeing the movie, I really broke down and I think it’s just superb, fantastic, mind blowing and unbelievable… I remembered my journey,” she said . Her message for viewers is, “Ladkiyan kuch bhi kar sakti hai,” which is also the tagline of the film. Poorna releases on 31 March, 2017 across roughly 24 cities, and two months later, it will go digital. Apart from Rahul Bose and Aditi Inamdar, this biopic also stars Heeba Shah, Dhritiman Chatterjee and Harsha Vardhan.