In November 2015, it was reported that Nandita Das had approached actor Irrfan Khan to play the leading role in her film Manto. Nandita said that, "Irrfan fits the role to the T as he speaks fluent Urdu, looks a lot like Manto and, above all, is a wonderful actor. He has read a lot of Manto himself and is influenced by him."
Nawazuddin Siddiqui worked for free.
The film premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Nandita Das made a short film titled "In Defence of Freedom", also starring Nawazuddin in the main role, and was released on YouTube on 23 March 2017.
Saadat Hasan Manto's (1912-1955) short stories set during the devastating partition of the Indian subcontinent were his defining works.[19] These irreverent, unflinching but deeply humane stories, earned him the wrath of the British Indian government and later of Pakistan. The stories were deemed obscene by the courts and he spent his last years fighting legal battles to defend his right to write. Today, his work is seen by both scholars and the reading public as one of the most authentic and independent accounts of the human tragedy of those years.