Azmeri Haque Badhon considers her life to have started just four years back. The Bangladeshi actor, whose Rehana Maryam Noor directed by Abdullah Mohammad Saad was the first Bangladeshi film to be selected in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival and was the opening film at the 26th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), had lived the 34 years before that following all the norms set by the society for women. With a life hardened by traumatic experiences and a mind broadened by art, she has decided to live on her own terms with all the rights and freedoms, and ensure the same for her daughter.
Her life has much in common with the character of Rehana, an assistant professor at a medical college and a single mother, who decides to fight against a professor who sexually harrassed a student.
"It was my life experiences which brought the director to me, because he saw Rehana in me. It helped me a lot though it was a painful process for me because when I was recalling all my past traumas. I am not a trained actor and do not know method-acting. I used to be a superficial actor, who just wanted to do it for survival. I am a very sensitive person who cries for my own pain as well as for others. The director wanted the pain of the character to be real, but he stood by me when I had nervous breakdowns while going through the process," says Badhon, in an interview to The Hindu.
At the age of 19, Badhon's parents forcibly got her married to a man from whom she had to face harassment. But her parents dismissed her when she shared her experience. She says that she fell into an overdose of anti-hypertensive drugs and even contemplated suicide, before her brother took her to a rehabilitation centre. Out of rehab, she came across a billboard announcing a beauty contest, the winner of which will get a chance to act in a film based on a work by popular Bangladeshi writer Humayun Ahmed.
"I had no interest in acting. I just wanted to meet him, tell my story and die. But that journey changed my life. I got 3 lakh taka from the contest. I went back to my BDS studies, which my in-laws had stopped and also got a divorce. After the divorce from my second marriage, I had to fight for my daughter's custodianship because in our Sharia law, a mother is never considered as a guardian. I decided to fight it, and I won. After that, I decided to take my life into my hands. It was then that Rehana came to me," she says.
Growing up in a conservative society, it has always been at the back of her mind that acting is not for "good girls", although she has acted in quite a lot of television series as well as films since 2006.
"The reception that we got at Cannes or at IFFK was not something I expected or dreamt about. I didn't know what to dream because the dream was also supervised by my parents or society. Because, in our country, after the age of 30, there is nothing to do for a woman. In films, they are not getting so much work as our industry is also male dominated," says Badhon.
She has just finished working in Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Khufia and Srijit Mukherji's series Rabindranath Ekhane Kokhono Khete Asenni (Rabindranath Never Came to Dine Here), a web series.
"I don't know what the future holds because it is not easy to get this kind of character in our country. I want to work with everyone from around the world, if they want to cast me and if I can trust the character. As of now, I have no idea how I could get out of the character of Rehana because I have no training. I think I am still living with a part of her, because she shaped me and changed my life a lot," she says.
