Tigers is based on a true story of a Pakistani pharmaceutical salesman who takes on a powerful multinational.

By Umer Nangiana

From the able hands of Academy Award winning director Danis Tanovich comes the story of an ordinary pharmaceutical salesman in Pakistan who decided to take on an influential and powerful baby food manufacturing multinational company.
Tigers, based on a true-story of a Pakistani salesman, is a feature-length docudrama featuring Bollywood star Emraan Hashmi in the lead role. Recently screened at the on-going Ajyal Film Festival, the film tells the story of a Pakistani pharmaceuticals salesman (introduced as Ayan) who risks everything, his own life, his family and challenges one of the world’s most powerful multinationals when he realised the baby milk formula he was being asked to sell by bribing and pressurizing the doctors was in fact killing hundreds of infants in his country.
The company is clearly identified in the film in the beginning, where the cast is shown on deciding to choose a safe fictional name ‘Lasta’ to being with.
Based on a true-story, the film does not involve much drama, but features some solid storytelling. Tanovich’s approach is simple. He has shown it as it happens, without making the viewer go through too many dramatic twists and turns.
But the director has managed to provoke the audience’s exasperation against the painful deaths of babies from formula milk. The film opens directly with a sequence featuring an off-screen exchange between US Senator Edward Kennedy and a spokesman for a baby formula producer during senate hearings in 1978.
The latter refuses to take any responsibility for the deaths of infants in developing countries. Ayan (Emran Hashmi) is a young, recently married salesman who gets a job peddling locally-made drugs to pharmacies and doctors.
Despite the fact that the Pakistani-manufactured pharmaceuticals he sells are much cheaper than those sold by Western competitors, no one will trust or buy products that lack major brand names. His wife encourages him to apply for a job with Lasta, a large multinational company, and Ayan is hired on a trial basis.
It’s not long before his natural charm and knack for glad-handing turns him into a minor star, and Lasta expands his responsibilities. However, one day he is devastated to see first-hand what the selling of baby formula really means in certain cases. Shocked, Ayan sets out to challenge the system and the powers that be.
Ayan quits his dream job and demands the company stop selling the formula in Pakistan. When he gets a local NGO connected to the World Health Organization, his life and that of his family is threatened. Then an offer from German TV turns up, promising to turn him into a hero.
In a neat piece of narrative structuring on Tanovic’s part, this David-and-Goliath story is told partially through the eyes of a film crew making a documentary on Ayan’s astonishing findings.
But the power of Tigers lies in his willingness to push his film out onto the streets of Pakistan and into the face of a system where narrow interests prevail, and an honest man doing the right thing is castigated and threatened, and finally sees his life endangered.
Tigers (initially titled White Lies) is a 2014 Indian-International film directed by Danis Tanovic, starring Emraan Hashmi. The film’s music is composed by Pritam. It was selected to be screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
The film is based on a real-life story, about a salesman working the pharmaceutical industry in Pakistan, discovers its truths, while selling baby formula products, and tries to fight against the system.
Danis Tanovic, born in 1969, is a Bosnian film director and screenwriter. He is best known for having directed and written the script for the 2001 Bosnian movie No Man’s Land, which won him the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He is widely considered one of the best contemporary Bosnian filmmakers of his generation and has garnered critical acclaim for many of his movies. In 2008, Tanovic established Naša Stranka, a grassroots political party based in Sarajevo.
He was a member of the jury at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. His most recent films include Triage (2009), starring Colin Farrell, Paz Vega and Christopher Lee and Cirkus Columbia (2010), starring Miki Manojlovi and Mira Furlan.