For a decade, FZ remained Bollywood’s conscience. In 2007, he made Gandhi, My Father . It was a brutal, tender portrait of the Mahatma’s strained relationship with his eldest son, Harilal. The film had no grandeur, no patriotic speeches. Just a father failing and a son drowning. The “masses” rejected it. The “classes” wept. FZ famously said, “I don’t make films for the weekend. I make them for the decade.”
His masterpiece arrived in 2018: The Last Salute . Based on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, it followed an aging government officer forced to exhume a mass grave. The final shot—the officer placing a single marigold on a pile of skulls, the silence broken only by a stray dog barking—lasted four minutes. Distributors begged him to cut it. He refused. The film earned a National Award but vanished from multiplexes in three days.
That film went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes.
