Rashmi Rocket director Akarsh Khurana on gender testing: “It’s a widespread practice happening at every level”- EXCLUSIVE

Rashmi Rocket is all set to release in just a few days on Dusshera. The film is about an athlete who is wrongfully made to undergo gender testing, is stripped of her rights and put to question, only to fight back up. The story of yhe film deals with a sensitive topic, something that we know roughly, but aren’t too aware of. Now, the director of the film, Akarsh Khurana has opened up about it.

In an exclusive interview, Akarsh revealed that he did have a rough idea about what it is, but did not know the extent to which it exists. He said, “The thing is that when there are a couple of high profile cases that have happened with athletes and you've read about them, you know about it. But you don't know this is happening at every level, it could be happening at a state level or be happening with girls from villages. It's a widespread practice. I definitely didn't know the extent or the details of it, there was just an awareness of it. But a lot of the education about the process happened in the process of writing the film.”

When asked if that was the reason that the film was not limited to a person and turned into a biopic, Akarsh said, “It was never meant to be a biopic. It was not a film about a real person, it was a film about a real process. And we wanted to make a fictional story around that. We wanted to tell the story that lead up to a situation in our film, and the circumstances of how she behaves after. We wanted to kind of tell the story, there was never talk of a biopic in that sense. It was always that we are tackling one kind of old-fashioned archaic process and telling this one fictional story and her journey and her struggle with the process.”.

Rashmi Rocket would release on the 15^th of OCtober