An aerial shot of Kolkata, its houses with narrow rectangular roofs stuck to each other like a string of matchboxes may have little connection with a 2,000-year-old West Asian city, Homs. But as the camera fitted to a drone rolls from Kolkata’s skyline to Homs, the connection is plain.
Both the cities look startlingly similar from the skies. But Homs—as the camera shifts—begins to resemble an abandoned graveyard, unlike Kolkata. While the houses still look like matchboxes, they are hollowed-out and the streets are littered with rubble. Homs, once Syria’s third largest city, is broken by war.
It is in this ancient city that the protagonist of a recent Bengali film Bhalobashar Shohor (City of Love), Adil, disappears. Adil is played by Kolkata-based actor Ritwick Chakraborty, and the role of his wife, Annapurna, who initiates the search, is played by Bangladeshi actor Joya Ahsan.
The film tells the story of a family stuck between its daily chores, its internal religious differences and war.
Written, produced and directed by Indranil Roychowdhury, a Film and Television Institute of India alumnus, it was released online sites earlier the week.
YouTube hit
Within hours of its global release, the film’s viewership crossed 75,000 on YouTube. Sitting in his dimly lit room, where three bottle-shaped lamps hang from the ceiling, Roychowdhury says he was “not sure” about the fate of Bhalobashar Shohor till its release.
“A couple from diverse religious backgrounds, a woman’s world divided between her love for her ailing daughter and her man who disappears in a city alien to her and us—it made me wonder if the viewer would want to watch such a complex narrative on the Internet where attention span is less,” he says pausing to take a sip of Darjeeling tea from a ‘yin and yang’ cup.
But what had him “seriously” anxious was the distribution through video-sharing networks, bypassing theatre-based distribution. “There is no formal distribution network for a 30-minute film…” and pushing a film through video-sharing sites, “was ambitious,” he says.
Roychowdhury, who has been a filmmaker for two decades now made Phoring (Dragonfly) on a tiny budget, for which he got a plethora of international awards including the Vincent Ward prize at the Shanghai International Film Festival and the Work-In-Progress Lab award in Goa, besides four Filmfare awards. But he had never made a film exclusively for the web. “It took time to figure out that a Bengali film can be released on video-sharing sites targeting Bengalis in Bangladesh, India and the rest of the world. I did not know if it would have a sizeable audience; now I know it does.”
Chairperson of International Short and Independent Film Festival of Bangladesh, Nasiruddin Yusuf Bacchu attributes Bhalobashar Shohor’s popularity to Bangladesh’s West Asian connection. “The protagonist from Kolkata goes to Syria to work and disappears. This is a familiar story in Bangladesh—so many thousands go to work in West Asia and are never heard from again,” he says.
Comments on YouTube are indicative of audience approval. “Words are too short to share my bhalo laga (liking) about the film,” writes one Rana Sarkar, who contributed ₹5,000 for the making of the film in response to the director’s appeal at the beginning of the film.
Bengali cinema needs resuscitation as the return on investment is “dreadful,” say executives in the industry.
In the red
Ashish Banerjee, the secretary of Eastern India Motion Pictures Association, says that out of 100 films only one or two make marginal profit, about five recover costs and the “rest are in the red”.
“The question is how long will we be able to produce as many films.”
Roychowdhury is convinced that filmmakers like him cannot “fit in” at the multiplexes. “Now technology has provided an opportunity to jump out of the system and Bhalobashar Shohor is a baby step... What technology provides people like us, who are consciously outside the mainstream, is an opportunity to communicate with our audience directly.” Data is becoming cheaper; online payment is now a common man’s tool, he adds. “What we need is an independent video-on-demand platform for India and Bangladesh, and there is a huge audience for content as this film indicates.”
“If India and Bangladesh can come together using the video-sharing platforms, we may revive the ailing Bengali industry in both the countries with its endless artists and technicians, says Yusuf. “ Bhalobashar Shohor has underscored that such joint ventures are possible.”
The film, meanwhile, has just started receiving advertisement from a streaming app, in the form of Hollywood trailers, and the director sounds relaxed. “It is not bad for a tiny movie to pull in trailers of Hollywood blockbusters,” he says between phone calls from viewers in Bangladesh.
