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.”