It is a proud moment for director Anurag Kashyap and the whole team of Bandar (Monkey In A Cage) as the film premiered at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2025. The prison drama had
its world premiere in the Special Presentations programme at the prestigious event, celebrating the best of Canadian and global cinema.
After its international premiere, Anurag sat for an interview with an entertainment news portal where he talked about the motivation and his research during the making of the film.
What inspired Anurag Kashyap to make Bandar?
Speaking to Variety, he said, “The idea came from a true story, but we obviously had to navigate very thin lines. You don’t know who’s right, who’s wrong. There was rampant misuse of new laws, with cases of one woman filing eight different cases in eight different police stations with the help of a lawyer and a policeman.”
The project took shape when producer Nikhil Dwivedi handed him a newspaper article about a real-life case. “As a filmmaker, diverse stories attract me. As much as possible for me, I try to avoid differentiating between them as commercial or offbeat. This subject fascinated me,” Dwivedi says.
What sets “Monkey in a Cage” apart from Anurag Kashyap’s previous work?
The filmmaker’s unflinching focus on India’s prison system is what made this film stand out. During research, Anurag Kashyap visited prisons and discovered that 77 per cent of inmates are accused of crimes, but their cases take years to come to trial or sometimes never do, often due to corruption, inefficiency, and systemic neglect.
“There was a case of a man who came out of prison after 32 years and was declared innocent, but his case never came up for 32 years. That’s an entire lifetime,” Kashyap says.
He revealed, “Every actor, every crew, everything had at some point or other had a breakdown. It was so difficult because it’s a very thin line we work on.”
Bandar’s diverse cast
Talking about the inclusion of actors speaking Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali and Marathi languages, he revealed that he wanted to represent the linguistic diversity found in Indian prisons. “In a prison, people speak all kinds of languages. We had actors speaking Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali and Marathi. The prison itself becomes a symbol of a divided, misunderstood country,” he said.
Presented by Rogers, the film also stars Kannada actors Raj B Shetty and Natesh Hegde, Indrajith Sukumaran from Malayalam, Ankush Gedam from Maharashtra and Riddhi Sen from Bengal in key roles.
Anurag Kashyap was all praise for Bobby Deol
Heaping praise at the Animal star, he revealed, “Bobby himself said there was one day when he suddenly felt like his life was over, his career was over. From the age of 5, he knew he’d be a star. When he was reaching 40, somebody told him he needed to do acting workshops. Nobody taught him how to learn acting. It was a revival for him.”
The director added, “He played vulnerable. He totally put his whole vulnerable self out there. He said he was playing a person for the first time in his life. He was always playing a hero or a villain, and playing a person for the first time. He gave all of himself to the film.”
Bandar’s storyline
Starring Bobby Deol, Saba Azad and Sanya Malhotra, the film explores the complex aftermath of #MeToo allegations in digital-age India. It revolves around the story of Samar, a fading television star whose fame is slipping through his fingers after his ex-girlfriend Gayatri accuses him of rape when he blocks all contact with her. The accusation leads to his arrest and throws him into a legal system more determined to keep him behind bars than to seek justice.
