Malayalam film S Durga was dropped from the IFFI last year and now it has been cleared by the censor board without any cuts.
Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, the director of the film, said the movie is now clear for public screenings with a ‘U/A’ certificate from the censor board.
Sasidharan is happy with the CBFC’s decision and he cannot wait for the film’s release. “They did not find anything wrong with the film. It is clear now that all that happened was done on purpose,” Sasidharan told PTI. He took to Twitter to share the new poster of the film, in which the title is, “S DURGA”.

Happy to share this. Revising Committee of #CBFC has cleared the censor certificate for @SDurgamovie #SDurga. Hope that the film will be released in India soon pic.twitter.com/rGr1OvpR84

— Sanal Sasidharan (@sanalsasidharan) February 21, 2018

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The director moved the Kerala High Court and received a favourable verdict after IFFI dropped the film and it got caught in the controversy. In light of the High Court order, a screening was organised for the festival jury members who sought the intervention of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).

On the last day of the festival, the censor board ordered a re-examination of the film, thus derailing its chances to be screened at IFFI. The bone of contention was the “white rectangular boxes” that followed the letter “S” in the revised title of the movie, which was initially named “Sexy Durga”.

In their affidavit to the Kerala High Court, the filmmaker had said that the white rectangular boxes in the title card of the film were nothing but white patches left in the print following the erasure of the letters ‘exy’ from the original title. An eight-member Revising Committee reviewed the film on January 23 before clearing it without any cuts.

“The title of the film in the credit roll was shown as ‘S Durga’, without any ‘S ###’ i.e. the rectangular white boxes. The title ‘S Durga’ was the title already certified by the CBFC, Thiruvananthapuram. It is apparent that the version exhibited for the Jury at IFFI, Goa, was differing from the version exhibited by the Revising Committee. In the version shown they did not find any tampering with the title or the font of the title or visuals form as suggested by the Examining Committee,” the CBFC letter, shared by Sasidharan, stated.

The director and the makers have been advised to “only exhibit the version of the film”, reviewed by the Revising Committee. Marathi film “Nude”, which was also dropped from the Panorama segment, recently received ‘A’ certificate from the CBFC, without any cuts.

-With PTI inputs