'Yeh Ballet' director Sooni Taraporevala accuses Deepika Padukone's latest Levi's ad of plagiarism

Recent ad by apparel brand Levi's featuring Bollywood actor Deepika Padukone has run into controversy with director Sooni Taraporevala accusing the makers of plagiarising from her film Yeh Ballet.

Yeh Ballet was released last year on the OTT platform Netflix and deals with the story of two gifted but underprivileged Mumbai teens who face bigotry and disapproval as they pursue their dancing dreams. The film was written and directed by Sooni Taraporevala and was produced by Siddharth Roy Kapur.

Sooni wrote on her Instagram page about her reaction when she saw the ad and how it has been allegedly plagiarised by Nadia Marquard Otzen, the director of the Levi's ad.

She wrote, "A couple of days ago someone brought this @levis_in ad to my attention. I was shocked to see our Yeh Ballet dance studio set in this ad because it was conceptualized & created out of a derelict space by @shalzoid (our PD) from scratch and dismantled after our shoot. Basically @nadiaeye (the director of this ad) saw Yeh Ballet and decided to plagiarize our set down to the very last detail (swipe for screenshot). Would Levi’s and the director ever think of doing that in the west without permission/acknowledgement, and passing it off as their own creative work? This is not homage this is intellectual theft! It’s SO unfair to our wonderful production designer @shalzoid to have her work ripped off like that."

Sooni also shared a screenshot in which production designer and art director Rupin Suchak, who was tagged in the post, said "Yes we did. Infact, that is what our director wanted so we had to recreate that", in the reply to a comment on Instagram, "Wow, that is exactly like the studio in Yeh Ballet- the film, did you guys shoot there?"

Deepika shared the advertisement on her Instagram page last week and it was applauded by her husband, Ranveer Singh, actor Ayushmann Khurrana, Hrithik Roshan, and others.