Loev Director Sudhanshu Saria Fumes Against Poster Plagiarism By ALT Balaji’s His Story: ‘I Was Shaking, I Was So Upset’- EXCLUSIVE
AltBalaji series, His Story was accused of stealing the design of the poster for Loev. Loev director Sudhanshu Saria couldn’t believe it when he saw that his poster had been ripped off
Sudhanshu Saria, the director of Loev the very beautiful 2017 same-sex love story featuring Shiv Pundit and Dhruv Ganesh(the latter passed away suddenly, soon after the film was completed) was shocked to see the poster of a new Ekta Kapoor produced web series entitled His Story about a closeted family man(Satyadeep Mishra) who comes out when he meets the character played by Mrinal Dutt.
Sudhanshu says he couldn’t believe it when he saw that his poster had been so shamelessly ripped off. “I was shaking. I was so upset! I posted about it on social media. They've apologized and seem to have taken down their hatchet job. But it's the culture of derivation that saddens me. Why do they do this? What makes them think they can get away with it?”
This is not the first time Ekta Kapoor’s production company has been pulled up for plagiarizing a poster. Just recently the poster of another same-sex romance A Married Woman was discovered to have copied its poster from the Kate Winslet starrer Ammonite.
One of the actors from His Story seemed very upset by this development. “I had no idea our poster was a copy. Why do something so shameful? The Loev director has every reason to be upset.”
The His Story poster was taken down by Balaji after filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane wrote a scathing comment on social media against the blatant plagiarism.
ALT Balaji issued an apology to the makers of Loev and it read, “On the 9th of April, we released a poster of ‘His Story’ and were made aware o0f the existence of Sudhanshu’s ‘Loev’ poster. The uncanny resemblance and similarity cannot be written off as a mere coincidence. It has been an oversight on part of our design team. For this, we apologise.”
The statement further added, “We respect the creativity of every designer and would never intentionally life their work nor disregard their talent. Thus, an apology to the artists involved in the making of this poster is warranted. We have deleted the poster from all our platforms and we humbly apologise to the artists involved in the creation of the beautiful poster of ‘LOEV’.”
Image source: Instagram/iamsuds