Latest news with #Ganatra
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Freakier Friday cast and crew criticise ‘hurtful' Asian stereotypes in 2003 film
The director and leading cast member of Freakier Friday, the soon-to-be-released sequel to Disney's 2003 body-swap comedy Freaky Friday, have criticised the 'hurtful' Asian stereotypes of the older film and said they 'owed audiences to make it right'. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, director Nisha Ganatra, a Canadian whose parents were first generation immigrants from India, said of the 2003 film: 'I remember watching it and feeling torn, mostly about the Asian representation … It was something I brought up right away when I had my first meetings with the producers. I had a moment of the presentation that was like, 'problematic Asian representation!'' Ganatra was referring to a pivotal scene in Freaky Friday, in which stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, playing a mother and daughter, read the messages in a pair of magical fortune cookies in a Chinese restaurant which then triggers their body swap. (This is not a scene that appears in either the original 1972 novel, written by Mary Rodgers or the 1976 film adaptation starring Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris.) Freakier Friday, written by Jordan Weiss, has dropped a repeat of the Chinese restaurant scene, given Rosalind Chao and Lucille Soong, the actors who appeared in the 2003 scene, cameo appearances, and, according to Ganatra, provides 'little moments that don't betray this movie, but were satisfying for people who found hurtful moments in the last one'. The Philippines-born Canadian actor Manny Jacinto, who plays Lohan's fiance in Freakier Friday, also expressed concerns about the earlier film, saying: 'I remember watching the first Freaky Friday and being like, this did not age very well, regarding the diverse characters.' Jacinto added: 'Knowing Nisha and speaking to other people within our circles, I knew we had a captain who was very much aware of those archetypes, or those issues presented in the first one.' Ganatra said: 'It was a different time and wasn't done intentionally [in the 2003 film], but it's a real thing. It's something I, being Asian, was super conscious of.'
Hindustan Times
30-04-2025
- Hindustan Times
Kolkata hotel fire eyewitnesses recount harrowing ordeal
Kolkata: When 69-year-old Bipin Ganatra reached one of the rooms on the third floor of the Rituraj Hotel in central Kolkata along with the fire-fighters to search for survivors around 3am on Wednesday, he found two kids and their father trapped in the room. They were all dead, he said. 'While the boy was lying on the bed, the girl's body was found near the toilet door. Their father was lying in the toilet. They were all dead. The bodies were not charred. They all possibly choked to death because of the smoke,' said Ganatra, a voluntary firefighter who received Padma Shri for his work in 2017, told HT. In all, 14 persons, including a woman and two children, were killed when a fire broke out in the six-storey hotel late on Tuesday night. 'The fire started on the first floor. One of the hotel owners, Akash Chawla, started pouring buckets of water to douse the flames. Gradually when the flames started spreading, he asked us to alert the boarders and vacate the building,' said Dasarath Das, an employee of the hotel. As the smoke and the fire started spreading, panic struck the boarders and the staff of the hotel. They all started running to save their lives. 'In the melee we heard a loud thud. When we looked down, we saw it was Manoj Paswan, a hotel staff. He had jumped from the third floor out of panic and died,' Das added. Preliminary investigation has revealed that while Paswan died after jumping from the third floor, the rest died due to asphyxiation. 'Most of the bodies were found either in the rooms, or in the common space. None were charred. They had all died due to the smoke,' said another staff. Another staff, Amalendu Naskar, said that most of the boarders and the hotel staff ran towards the terrace as the smoke and fire had engulfed both the stairways. Climbing down was impossible. There was thick smoke in the staircase and the temperature was rising every second. There were 25 of us. We all reached the terrace from where we were rescued.' Neha Agarwal, a resident of Odisha who had come to Kolkata on a vacation with her family, recounted how she along with her husband and nephew got trapped on the fourth floor. 'One of my relatives had gone down to buy something. He called us and said the hotel was on fire and we should come down immediately. When we opened the door of the room, the entire corridor was filled with thick smoke. We couldn't see anything, nor could we breathe. We closed the door and ran back to the room. My husband broke open the window and we climbed down on the sunshade. We waited there for almost two hours before the fire brigade rescued us,' Agarwal told the media. Locals who joined the firefighting and rescue said that people had come out of their rooms through the windows and some waited on the sunshades. 'We could hear them screaming. Some were waving their hands to attract the attention of the firefighters. Thick smoke was billowing out of some of the windows. We were all standing on the road. All we could do was to shout at the top of our voice and ask the trapped hoteliers to stay calm till help arrived,' said Sandip Bhardwaj, a local shopkeeper. Locals said that as the hotel was undergoing some repair and renovation work, one of the exits was blocked with construction materials such as plywood boards. Some of the windows were also sealed leaving very less ventilation for the smoke to escape. 'The fire broke out on the first floor where some renovation and repair work were going on. Plywood and other combustible materials were stacked there. The smoke engulfed the entire building. The smoke detectors and fire-fighting system didn't work. The systems were totally defunct,' said Ranvir Kumar, director general of the state fire and emergency services.
