26TH KIFF: Priyo Chinar Pata Iti Segun chosen for screening for Asian competition- NETPAC competition

Kumar Chowdhury who is a familiar face on the Bengali screen has done the screenplay, written the dialogue and directed the film which marks his directorial debut. He has picked on unknown faces for his plethora of actors.

The USP of the film lies in the fact that for the first time in Indian cinema, a young director has taken courage in his hands and with hope in his heart, has explored the issue of the Rohingya refugees shown through a young girl who finds herself in Kolkata in a woman’s shelter and has no clue where her parents are and whether they are still alive or not.

“This film is a document of a turbulent times we live in,” says the director who claims that this is a true story and that he has actually interacted with the young girl trying to find a way out of the shelter home and look for her lost parents.

Sitting in an orphanage in Kolkata, a girl writes a letter to her Nani(grand ma), wondering whether they would ever meet again. A handsome young man arrives in the shelter home with his father to sell carpets from Kashmir. He assures the young girl that he will try and help her in looking for her lost family. The girl is a runaway refugee from Mynamar, a Muslim Rohingya who finds shelter in the orphanage which, it appears, runs a school and other stitching classes within the premises.

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The boy is a Kashmiri Muslim and his father and he are passing through terrible times because Kashmir is literally under siege. So, they come all the way from Kashmir to sell their ware from time to time and this orphanage is one of their stops.

The two young outsiders fall in love in Kolkata and hope to build a future together but as their situation is fraught with political and financial problems, one has no clue if their love story will end happily or not. The politicisation of pockets of people, often labelled “refugees” without a homeland, forms the crux of the story

The film is produced under the banner of Arko Films by Piyali Chowdhury. The running time is a bit too lengthy and could have been trimmed a bit. The pace is slow but that is what the story demands. Chowdhury has kept the drama, the acting and the unfolding on quite a low key so there is no loudness or glamour which adds to the aesthetics of the film.

Art direction by Kumar Chowdhury, Sukalyan Ray and  Dibendu Chakraborty is good but the colour correction needed to be attended to. “If only there is a world without racism, casteism, bigotry, imperialism, the world would have been a different place,” says Chowdhury .

Let us put our hands together and pray that the film pleases the NETPAC Jury.

(Reported by Shoma A. Chatterji)