Triumph of labour

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for debutante filmmaker Aditya Vikram Sengupta. Last month, his Bengali film Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) won him a rousing standing ovation and the Fedeora Award for the best director in a debut film at the prestigious Venice Film Festival. The honour was a long time coming for Bengali cinema, which hadn’t seen an entry to the prestigious festival for a decade. The last Bengali film to feature was Goutam Ghose’s Abar Aranye (2003). Since his big win at Venice, Sengupta has premiered his film at the Busan International Film Festival and a host of other international film festivals. It was also screened this week at the 16th Mumbai Film Festival in the India Gold section. Filmed over a year in Kolkata and North Bengal, Sengupta’s film is devoid of dialogues but is unmistakably a Bengali film. “The background sounds, songs and TV commentaries make it clear that my characters are Bengali,” says the 30-year-old director.

The concept of the film came to him after reading a simple two-page short story by author Italo Calvino about a couple that doesn’t get to meet each other because they work on different shifts.

In Sengupta’s film, the couple, played by actors Ritwick Chakraborty and Basabdatta Chatterjee, are grappling with the pressures of the recession that hit a few years ago. “I liked the idea of the couple not being able to meet. We contextualised it and set it against the spiralling recession in Bengal. The film became about silences, the objects that the characters interact with in each other’s absence and exploring love through them,” explains the National Institute of Design graduate. The initial version of the screenplay did have some sequences with dialogues, but, as the shoot progressed, they were deemed redundant and done away with.

Though made on a tight budget, Sengupta says he has exhausted all his savings to make this labour of love. Like it is with most independent filmmakers, drumming up support from financiers proved difficult. After repeatedly doing the rounds of producers’ offices, his wife Jonaki and he decided to bankroll the project themselves. “For the first leg of the shoot, we borrowed money from someone. In the second leg, we put in our own money and in the third, we took a loan to return the money to first person. Thankfully, we’ve paid every one off,” he says. His crew consisted of only six people, which meant each person was performing multiple roles throughout the making. “I remember my dad sitting on the staircase and doing all the accounting work,” he says, with a laugh. He hopes by the time he’s ready to make his second film, the success of Asha Jaoar Majhe will make it easier for him to find the backing of a producer.

The next major hurdle is looking for distributors in the country to give his film a theatrical release sometime early next year. But for now, he’s set his eyes on the upcoming BFI London Film Festival, where he will be competing for the coveted Sutherland Award.

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