It's an incarnation of the classic love-torn couple Devdas and Paro as never seen before - fighting each other as political adversaries in Sudhir Mishra's version of Devdas that goes on the floor in August.

"It's more like William Shakespeare's Hamlet as applied to the politics of India," said Mishra. He will shoot Devdas in the deserts of Rajasthan.

"I want those vast stretches of sand for dramatic emphasis," said Mishra who has made films like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and Chameli.

The truth is never far away from Mishra's cinema. He now wants to make a new genre of cinema, what he calls a 'mockumentary'.

"It'd be shot in the documentary style. The events would all be dramatic recreations of real incidents. I'm planning to apply this format to my film on the life of doctor-activist Binayak Sen, the child specialist in Chhattisgarh who has been accused of sedition and jailed.

"It is interesting to film the lives of real characters who are caught in a moral crisis. In that sense the life of Binayak Sen is no different from that of Hamlet or Devdas," he said.