Burqa City director 'surprised' by similarity with Laapataa Ladies' plot

French filmmaker Fabrice Bracq, director of the 2019 Arabic short film Burqa City, has raised serious concerns over the originality of Kiran Rao’s critically acclaimed feature Laapataa Ladies, alleging that it bears multiple striking similarities to his own work. Kiran Rao's Lapata Ladies, India's official entry to the Oscars and projected as an original work, actually seems heavily inspired by a 2019 short film titled Burqa City. Set in Middle East, the 19 min film follows a newlywed man whose wife gets exchanged due to identical pic.twitter.com/b7GcHN2MmI— THE SKIN DOCTOR March 31, 2025 In the same chat, he added, "The scene where the kind husband searches for his wife in various shops is particularly revealing - he shows the shopkeepers a photo of his veiled wife, just like in the short film, and then the shopkeeper's wife comes out wearing a burqa, almost like a nod to Burqa City. There's also the similarity in the plot twist at the end, where we learn that the woman deliberately chose to run away from her abusive husband - a key narrative element in Burqa City."