Jaanisaar (2015)

Some twenty years after the uprising of 1857, Amir Haider returns to his family estate in Awadh. Brought up and educated by the British, he sees India through foreign eyes, until he meets Noor, a celebrated tawaif whose singing and dancing hide her work for the freedom fighters. Through her he begins to see his own land differently, and is forced to choose between the comfortable loyalties of his upbringing and the cause she believes in. Jaanisaar was Muzaffar Ali's return to feature direction more than two decades after films like Umrao Jaan, and it shares that film's love of the culture of old Lucknow: its poetry, music, costumes and courtly manners. It introduced Pakistani actor Imran Abbas and fashion designer Pernia Qureshi in Hindi films.