Okay - storyline only.

Not very interesting. Epic, perhaps. Important, maybe. Historic? I don't know. But from what you tell us here I'm not interested in spending 3 - 4 hours with this story.

I suspect it's your "pitch" more than your story.

=============================================
The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

A few questions that come immediately to mind:

-- Why is Frances sent to India in the first place?
-- How do she and Usman meet? If she's to help him later, you need to establish the connection early on. Otherwise there's no reason for her to help.
-- When you say "Balin kills the mistress of his estate", whose estate are you referring to? Does Usman have a part in this? If so, again, why would Frances help him? If not, why does he need to go into refuge?

Coming Out of Left Field
http://bostonian71.blogspot.com

I see strong creativity in your story but I'm not sure or the genre. Is it action, Drama or romance. I would think since you mentioned freedom fighters, you are aiming for an action movie, but action movies usualy start right from the beggining with intensity. At least to get the viewers atention to watch the rest of the movie. I realy like your storyline, but I am affraid the viewer might fall asleep before its gets good. So to cut to the purpose of this reply, I think that if you have some tipe action sequence right in the begining you just might keep their attention long enough to effectively tell your story.

White Tiger Films

Thanks for the feedback. I'll get to work on them. 🙂

Characters are everything. As long as you have well-developed, interesting characters that the audience will be able to identify with, just about any story can be made great.

Yeah you said disregarding any technicalities but you didn't give enough storyline to really grasp onto so I'm gonna give you technicalities.

I see serious problems with the marketability of your story. That may not be a concern of yours but it probably should be. What's the point of making a movie if nobody sees it. First 3-4 hours, unless you're making it for the BBC using government money I think you should start to reconsider your length, or make it into a trilogy or something. Second who is the audience? Americans tend to not care about what happened in India back then. I'm not to sure the British audience will be lining up to see a long movie telling them how bad they were. And what you're talking about is way to dramatic for Bollywood so I don't think you can really count on an Indian audience either.

So basically you've got a very long arthouse picture. So you better keep it cheap to make. If you are actually in India perhaps you can film this cheap, just need some period costumes and vehicles, but trying to fake India anywhere else is probably gonna come off poorly.

To tell you the truth you might have the makings of a very good novel with this story, but I just don't see it as a film.

Also, consider the pacing of a script: a page usually averages out to equal one minute of film time. So where you are in your story, with all this having happened, you're only 18 minutes into your proposed 180-240. Continuing to write your story at this pace might lead to a movie filled with a lot of little events, and make it seem too cluttered. What you should do is focus on detailing your events, but to an extent.

Chances are, there's more to the scenes you've written so far that you haven't actually written. Go back and read them over and make sure you really tell everything you want to see on screen, every action point and line of dialogue (even if it doesn't immediately progress the story, let there be some dialogue that develops characters a bit and establishes them at this early point in your story). Don't overdue it, which could drag your scenes out and make them boring, but make sure there's more to each scene than simply the minimum of what is needed to move to the next one.