Mumbai’s underworld in the 1990s didn’t look like a movie. If the trailer of Vishal Bhardwaj`s new film O Romeo is anything to go by, it looked like peeling paint, imitation silk and metal slowly losing its sheen. That is the city Bhardwaj rebuilds in O Romeo. Inspired by characters in Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges’ Mafia Queens of Mumbai and evolving from the long-shelved Sapna Didi story he held on to for nearly a decade, the film is less about gangsters as legends and more about the worlds that made them. But the film’s milieu - its grime, its romance and its violence are placed in a deeply researched world.

For Bhardwaj, cinema’s job is precisely this act of remembering. He tells us, “Cinema is a mirror of society. It can change the world, but actually it reflects society and shows us our real face, which we are very afraid to see. To me, it`s like journalistic work, like a journalist, like a newspaper, which records life, time, similarly, cinema records the problems of its time, the celebration of its time, the problems of its time, society, politics, everything is recorded in it, like a history.”