‘Stolen’ director Karan Tejpal: ‘The film is about trust and having a conscience’

Karan Tejpal’s Stolen was premiered to a rapturous response at the Mumbai Film Festival in 2023. Tejpal’s feature debut, about the nightmarish experiences of two affluent brothers who are mistaken for kidnappers in a rural corner of India, was expected to get a theatrical release. Instead, Stolen has been picked up by Prime Video, where it will be streamed from June 4.

The Hindi movie’s emergence has benefitted from the backing of directors Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Nikkhil Advani and Vikramaditya Motwane. Written by Tejpal, Gaurav Dhingra and Swapnil Salkar-Agadbumb, Stolen stars Shubham Vardhan, Abhishek Banerjee, Mia Maelzer, Harish Khanna and Sahidur Rahaman.

In an interview, 40-year-old Tejpal described himself as an “accidental filmmaker”. A product of Mayo College in Ajmer and St Stephen’s College in Delhi, Tejpal set out to be a hockey player but instead veered towards cinema.

Tejpal worked in the Hindi film industry as an assistant director for several years, starting with Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006). Tejpal squeezed in a filmmaking course at the New York Film Academy, returning to Mumbai to develop scripts and shoot commercials.

Stolen was inspired by a lynching that took place in Assam in 2018, a horrific incident that haunts Tejpal to this day, he told Scroll. Here are excerpts from the interview.

Stolen is meant for...

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