Gehraiyaan intimacy director Dar Gai on family in Ukraine: 'My grandmother refused to leave. She wants to fight'
Ukrainian filmmaker Dar Gai, best known as the intimacy director on Gehraiyaan, talks about her family back home and how they are dealing with the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
Ukrainian filmmaker Dar Gai is best known in India for her work as the intimacy director in the recently-released film Gehraiyaan. The filmmaker lives with her husband in Mumbai but has family back in her home country Ukraine. Given the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis, it has been a tough few weeks for Dar. In a recent interview, she revealed that several of her family members are hiding in various parts of the country as the war has escalated. (Also read: Gehraiyaan intimacy director Dar Gai on working with Deepika Padukone-Siddhant Chaturvedi: They were ready to experiment)
Dar Gai hails from the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and grew up there, living there for 22 years. In a recent interaction, she admitted that apart from family, she also has several close friends there and she is worried about their safety as well. She informed that although her parents have now made it out of Kyiv, they were trapped there for days.
Speaking to the Times of India, Dar said, “My parents tried to leave Kyiv for several days, but they couldn’t because there was a lot of traffic as many people were trying to get to safer places. However, they later went to our village, which is around 45 minutes away from Kyiv."
In fact, the filmmaker said that her 78-year-old grandmother refused to leave her home and said that she wanted to fight instead. She added, "My grandmother, who is 78, refused to leave from there because she said, ‘Who will fight here? I want to fight. I don’t want to leave.' So, she is in there with my stepfather. My mother and brother travelled to the border to send the women and kids across. They are on their way back to stay with my grandmother. However, the bridge that connects our village to other roads was bombed, so they cannot get to the village. They are stuck somewhere in the middle of Ukraine, trying to find out if there’s some safe way to go back to Kyiv."
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After growing up in Ukraine, Dar came to India to direct plays in Gwalior's Scindia School. She also taught screenwriting and film appreciation in Mumbai before venturing into direction. She directed two films in 2018.
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