Exclusive! The Song of Scorpions director Anup Singh decodes the magical connection between Irrfan Khan and Golshifteh Farahani

It would be hard for a regular audience to point out that Nooran, the female lead of the late Irrfan Khan’s last film The Song of Scorpions, is an Iranian actress, as she has beautifully embodied the character of a Rajasthani tribal woman in the Anup Singh directorial.

In an exclusive conversation with OTTplay, Anup talks about how Irrfan and Golshifteh were two individuals, who even though came from two different parts of the world, were deeply connected as artistes.

Sharing his observation from numerous conversations the director had with both the actors, Anup said, “I think both of them are true artistes, who are constantly in search of who they really are and the search is a journey in itself. As we know that Golshifteh is living in exile after the Iranian government disapproved of some of her artistic work in the past, what struck me about her is, she has no bitterness about the exile. She rather looked at the whole situation very positively as she feels that it opened her to explore other possibilities of life and forced her to think about ‘who she really is’. Very interestingly, Irrfan, in many of our conversations in the past, talked about soul searching and finding out who Irrfan is… That was the meeting point between these two magical artistes! I feel absolutely fortunate therefore to bring these two actors in a film like The Song of Scorpions.”

In the film, the actress played the village girl, named Nooran, who has a magical voice and a scorpion singer who can counter the poison of a scorpion by singing songs. In an unfortunate incident, she was thrown away from her own village and when Aadam, played by Irrfan, marries her and brings her to his village, she discovers another eye-opening reality that set her on the path of vengeance.

This was the first time the Iranian actress worked with Indian filmmakers and actors, followed by the American Netflix film Extraction, released in 2020, which featured Indian actors like Pankaj Tripathi, Priyanshu Painyuli and Randeep Hooda.

The film also stars legendary actress Waheeda Rehman, Shashank Arora, Kritika Pande, Sara Arjun and Tillotama Shome.