There have been good movies about Hitler, and bad TV shows about Hitler, and Springtime for Hitler. What type of Hitler movie will Director Rakesh Ranjan Kumar’s Dear Friend Hitler be? The Bollywood film — disappointingly, not a musical — is set to come out at the end of this year and focuses on the Fuhrer’s last days, his relationship with Eva Braun, and the workings of the Free India Legion, a unit of the German Army made up of Indian soldiers. Kumar, who has cast a well-known Bollywood actor, Anupam Kher, as Hitler and a former Miss India, Neha Dhupia, as Braun, says he “aims to capture the personality of Adolf Hitler,” and that, “By the title, people might take it as a periodic or war film, but we have portrayed neither. Rather it’s a war of conscience going on in the mind of Hitler.” Oh, and one of his producers gave the following, eyebrow-raising quote: “If we should thank anybody for Indian freedom, it should be Hitler.” (The London Times tries to explain that this is “a reference to how Britain’s war effort exhausted its finances, contributing to its relinquishing control over its former Empire.”) Well, we’ll see how this one goes!
Eva Braun: as seen by Bollywood in Hitler biopic with Indian twist [Times UK]
