Nasseruddin Shah in Shoot on Sight

London, April 6: Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, stars of the controversial new movie Shoot on Sight, based on the London bombings of 2005, have been invited to Cannes, the film’s director Jagmohan Mundhra told The Telegraph today.

Shoot on Sight will have market screenings at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14 and 15, said Mundhra, as he prepared he leave London today to fly to Mumbai where he will begin a different phase in his life making Bollywood movies, initially with one featuring Govinda.

“But I will come to Cannes and also back to London for its general release in the UK,” said Mundhra, who is a green card holder normally based in Los Angeles, except he has been living in London for the last three years, making Provoked, starring Aishwarya Rai, followed by Shoot on Sight.

The director did not submit Shoot on Sight for official selection at Cannes but, with nearly 4,000 journalists and even more executives from film companies present, the movie is likely to prove controversial.

It makes for uncomfortable viewing because Mundhra has based it on the London suicide bombings of July 7, 2005, the gunning down of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, and the highprofile role played at the time by Britain’s most senior Muslim police officer, Tarique Ghaffur, the assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard.

Although the film is described as “a work of fiction based on real events”, the similarity with what happened in London during the summer of 2005 is entirely deliberate, Mundhra admitted.

Apart from Cannes, it will go the Stuttgart Film Festival, which has a section — Bollywood and Beyond — where it will be shown on closing night, the director said.

Shoot on Sight begins with the death of the young Muslim in the London Underground and ends with the gunning down of another in a shopping centre.

The start is chilling: armed police run down escalators, shoving people out of the way, point a gun at a young Muslim about to board an Underground train and shout at him to raise his hands. As other passengers scream, he makes the fatal mistake of reaching into his pocket. It turns out he was only probably going to switch off his MP3.

The film is being dubbed into Urdu, will go round the world and help shape international perception of what Britain and its police are like as Mundhra poses the question (included in the posters): “Is it a crime to be a Muslim?”

The movie’s central character is a senior Muslim officer, commander Tariq Ali, played by Naseeruddin Shah (known to UK viewers from Monsoon Wedding).

“No film had shown the plight of a liberal, progressive, democratic, peaceloving, integrated Muslim in the western world,” said Mundhra, who also cast Greta Scacchi as the officer’s wife and Om Puri (star of East is East) as a radical mullah.

It falls to the Muslim police officer to lead the hunt for a Muslim terrorist.

Scotland Yard said it could not help Mundhra make the movie.

Mundhra believes that Britain has dealt rather better with the events of 2005 than America did with 9/11.

“America is worse about these things,” he commented. “After 9/11 it was really terrible. In America they used to shoot Sikhs thinking they were Osama bin Laden. America is that ignorant. Especially since I have been living here, I realise there is such a large population of Muslims; you cannot go to Heathrow airport without seeing half the women in hijab. You walk on Edgware Road, you see 90 per cent of people walking up and down are Muslims. Considering what happened here on July 7, I admire the fact there is plenty of restraint.”