Netflix announces series on 1999 Kandahar hijack, Anubhav Sinha to direct show

Mumbai: The December 24, 1999 hijack of the Indian Airlines flight is getting a series treatment at Netflix with Anubhav Sinha attached as creator and director.

The show is titled IC 814: The Kandhar Hijack and stars Vijay Varma, Patralekha, Pankaj Kapur, Naseeruddin Shah, Arvind Swamy, Dia Mirza, Kumud Mishra, Manoj Pahwa, Amrita Puri, and Anupam Tripathi.

According to the makers, the series revolves around "the 24th December 1999 hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight IC 814 which was en route from Kathmandu to New Delhi. It was taken to Kandahar. The hijack lasted seven days and while the crew and passengers suffered, officers back home tried to find a solution to bring them home." Sinha, known for films such as Mulk, Article 15 and Bheed, said it was a responsibility to be as authentic as possible while working on the series.

"When I started doing research, almost everyone remembers a few things about the hijack, and what all happened during the process. I realised it is a very complex story and a lot of things happened in those seven days and not many people know about it."

Sinha added, "I met a lot of officers, passengers, the pilot, and there was a lot more to share. We have put it all in the show… We had to make it factually correct and yet dramatic and engaging... It was an interesting process," the director said at the Netflix event here.

Sinha added Monika Shergill, Vice President, Content, Netflix India, had promised him that the shooting of the series will conclude within eight months but it went on for two years.

Shergill described the show as a 'thrilling, propulsive rendition of the longest hijacking in the history of aviation in the world'.

"When we started out on this story, it took us a while to get down to actually making it in the right way. It was a journey for us because it is such a journalistic sort of piece, but it is such a large story of human interest and it had to be told in the most dramatic and thrilling fashion," Shergill told PTI.

Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Pooja Gor, Kanwaljit Singh, Aditya Srivastava, Sushant Singh, and Yashpal Sharma also round out the cast of IC 814: The Kandhar Hijack.