Time to Criticise the Critics: Ki & Ka Director R Balki

The Ki & Ka director said he doesn’t make films for the critics, and that his only aim is to please his audience.

While R Balki’s latest offering, the Arjun and Kareena Kapoor starrer Ki & Ka got a thumbs down from film critics at large, going by the film’s box office collections, the general audience seems to have given it a thumbs up. Balki is both happy and a bit angry. At the film’s success party, he gave film critics a taste of their own medicine.

Sometimes the critics feel only they have the power to criticise something. It is time for the film industry to criticise the critics’ work, because that also works either way. Critics should review a film for the audience not for some person in the Berlin Film Festival. Some people who call themselves critics, they are the kind of people who watch Czech films without subtitles and praise it. They watch a brown leaf fall for 45 minutes and say ‘what a poetic scene’. I do not have any idea where these people come from...I do not personally know any critics among those ‘elite critics’ we are talking about.

R Balki, Filmmaker

The Ki & Ka director went on to say that he doesn’t make films for the critics, and that his only aim is to please his audience.

I am not here to make a film for critics. If they happen to like the film, it is fine but if the audience likes the film, then it solves the purpose. Otherwise, I would have been bankrupt for making a film for these people. Ki & Ka is a film about freedom of choice. Therefore, we all have the same kind of right. I think the critics should understand now that despite their reviews, the audience has gone against them. I agree that lots of things they say are right, but lots of things are absolutely wrong.

R Balki