"Casablanca" to be remade on Indian shores

By Tony Tharakan

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian filmmaker Rajeev Nath is remaking "Casablanca", swapping the Rick's Cafe of the Oscar-winning classic for a restaurant in south India, and the World War Two backdrop for the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

In the 1942 film, Humphrey Bogart played a club owner who romances a married Ingrid Bergman and helps her escape the Nazis with her husband, a resistance leader.

"My film will be a tribute to the original," said Nath, the director who plans to premiere his Malayalam language remake, "Ezham Mudra" (The Seventh Seal), in the coastal Moroccan city where the original was set.

"As a student of films, I had watched this great classic 20 times."

Nath's protagonist is an Indian diplomat-turned restaurateur who helps his lover and her husband, both Tamil separatist rebels fighting the Sri Lankan government, escape from India.

In the adaptation, the hero and his lover meet in a beachside restaurant.

Nath says his film will swap the World War Two background of the original for the separatist movement in Sri Lanka -- where Tamils have been fighting for a separate ethnic homeland in the north and east of the Indian Ocean island -- but does not indulge in any politics.

"It is neither against nor in support of their cause," said the 55-year-old director, who met some Tamil Tiger rebels during a trip to Norway.