Film shot in Busay causes Bollywood furor

CEBU, Philippines - A film shot under-the-radar last year in Busay, Cebu City is being wrongly tagged by the Bollywood press as an adult or pornographic picture. This was according to Philippine-based filmmaker-actor Stegath James Dorr during a visit to The FREEMAN office last April 26.

Dorr co-stars in Black Shama, the film in question, with Bollywood’s current female toast Sunny Leone.

“It is important for me to be clear that there was nothing adult or pornographic about Black Shama whatsoever and that some of the Indian press are printing patently false information about the classification of the material captured on film,” said Dorr, despite Leone being labeled in Bollywood entertainment write-ups as an adult film actress.

Black Shama, he explained, is of the horror genre about “abrasive pro-am bird photographers arousing the rancorous spirit of a medieval Malay witch doctor on sacred land.” Leone plays the role of a Canadian-Sikh professional photographer named Jenny Singh who takes vengeance for being turned into a witch. Incidentally, Leone is said to be of Sikh-Punjabi origin.

Dorr said one of the reasons the film garnered so much Indian press coverage was the “notorious rape sequence” between him and Leone, shot December 4, 2011 on the Q Horseback Riding Ranch located in the mountainous area of Barangay Tabunan.

April 2012 articles published in Bollywood entertainment websites forwarded by Dorr to this paper refer to him as a co-star and producer of this “adult film” eager to “cash in on Sunny Leone’s popularity in the country.”

One story indicates: “While adult film star Sunny Leone is busy shooting her Bollywood debut in Jaipur, it looks like Philippine-based actor-filmmaker Stegath Dorr is trying his best to cash in on the actress’ recently flourishing career in India. Dorr is looking to release his second adult content film with Sunny, Black Shama in the country. The sheer realistic nature of some scenes was so shocking that the Philippine Film Board would never allow the movie to see the light of day.”

Leone has landed a starring role in a popular commercial (meaning, a non-adult film) Indian franchise titled Jism 2. With her fans excited to see her in this movie, the Bollywood press theorize that Dorr’s eagerness to release Black Shama in theaters before Jism 2 is an indication that he is “riding on Leone’s hype and publicity.”

Dorr, a Canadian-American who has been residing in the Philippines since 2010 pointed out, “I had some objections to a trivial horror film featuring a rape sequence because that is a serious subject. But my executive producer and the director insisted on putting it on film. The infamous scene that the Indian press mass-publicized was a harrowing experience for me because I do not like to do nudity. I only participated on the insistence of the director and the British financier, who will remain anonymous.”

He adds, “While it is true that she and I did participate in a scene with some partial nudity it was not pornographic by any means and this is a legitimate, if unimportant horror film. The reports in the Indian press are misleading. The graphic rape scene had to be cut drastically to meet the censors and caused a furor in the Indian press last week.”

Black Shama was filmed in Busay for over six months, and is thoroughly Visayan in its feel and surroundings. Dorr stated there was no publicity during its production here because they wanted to shoot as quickly as possible for straight-to-video and cable release.

However, the recent soaring popularity of Leone in Bollywood led to a great deal of scandal in India involving the particular molestation-murder scene.

Despite top billing, Leone only plays a secondary role and has the least amount of screen time due largely to the demands of scheduling her.

It is local actress Rowena Duarte, in fact, who is the heroine and features heavily on-screen. A staple of CCTN TV dramas and the like, Duarte was commended by Dorr as having given a “striking central performance.”

Dorr felt he needed to rectify the Indian media reports, because a supposed adult film shot here will paint a negative picture for Cebu in the minds of tourists and foreigners. This was not his intention, he said. In fact, he wanted to show how Cebu was a viable, if better, option for film shoot locations.

“I feel that Black Shama will serve as a calling card to future foreign film investors who might be interested in having access or get greater bang for their buck than they can in Canada or the US or even Eastern Europe,” he ended.

In 2008, Dorr wrote, produced and starred in Pirate’s Blood, which also included Leone in the cast, along with Filipina actress Isabel Granada.

He also claimed appearing briefly in some Filipino movies, such as in one installment of the Regal Films franchise, Mano Po. (FREEMAN)