Directors’ Note: 

At the beginning of the lockdown, a scene flashed on our screens. It had been freshly re-voiced to simultaneously make fun of how we are behaving in the pandemic and to admonish us for how we should be behaving. This scene is from the film Krantiveer, or Brave Revolutionary (as it is called in English), made in Hindi in 1994. Though this scene was the film’s last, it’s not the last time we will see it. Krantiveer was remade, virtually shot –by shot, in Telugu as Punya Bhoomi Naa Desam (1995), and, more loosely, as Parodi in Kannada (2007). The scene has been reenacted/remixed variously in contexts ranging from street and stage comedy shows to, increasingly, as online, social media memes. The same scene was also recycled as the opening of the film’s official sequel, Krantiveer: The Revolution (2010), which one reviewer compared to “an empty glass in which the director keeps on pouring the water of patriotism without even caring that it is all falling out of it.” The scene’s recent appearances on our screens motivated an exploration of voice, redubbing, the line between authorship and authority, and an attempt to pour water on the scene to see what might fall out in Brave Revolutionary Redubbed.