Tasnim Nishat Tithi is soaring in the sky in Thailand's panoramic coastal city of Pattaya in the opening scene of Something Like An Autobiography, the new film of Bangladeshi director Mostofa Sarwar Farooki. By the time the movie ends an hour and twenty minutes later, we realise the colourful parachute the famous actor was sailing may have been as fragile as the social fabric of any nation in South Asia today.
Bangladeshi immigrants in Pattaya who soon swarm around Tithi wonder aloud why the accomplished actor hasn't had a child yet. Thus begins Something Like An Autobiography, the story of life and its consequences in a rapidly disintegrating society, which had its South Asia premiere at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival which concludes today.
Farooki, Bangladesh's most celebrated director who burst into South Asian Cinema two decades ago with Bachelor, a celluloid study of the web of love among young people in the new millennium, casts himself for the first time on screen in his new film, part of the Mumbai festival's Icons: South Asia category. The famous Bangladeshi actor Nusrat Imrose Tisha, Farooki's wife in real-life, plays the role of Tithi, and joins him as a celebrity couple in Dhaka.
Tithi, who has just accepted an offer to act in a Netflix film in Mumbai, and her husband are expecting the arrival of their first child after a long marriage.
The award-winning director, who founded an independent production house, Chabial, as a filmmakers' movement to change the course of cinema in his country, arrived in Mumbai last week to present the film, the first part of a 12-film anthology, Ministry of Love, which would soon start streaming on Bangladeshi OTT platform Chorki, headed by award-winning director-producer Redoan Rony, producer of Something Like An Autobiography. Last Defenders of Monogamy, the series' second and also directed by Farooki, has just completed production.
In the film, Tithi and husband Farhan Reza Chowhdury (Farooki) are celebrities in Dhaka going about their lives on their own terms. Soon, the overbearing patriarchy comes in between their public and private persona, transforming everything from pregnancy to delivery.
"We started writing the script before the pandemic," says Farooki about a collaboration that saw both diving into uncharted territories. Tisha became a first-time scriptwriter and Farooki a first-time actor. "For a film that deals with motherhood, it was essential to have a female point of view," says the director. "Women are the heroes here, not men."
"In the meantime, Tisha conceived in real-life," beams Farooki about their first and only child from a long marriage, Ilham. "She was gathering her own experience," adds the director who had explored a film that deals with a single woman before. But that experience in Third Person Singular Number (2009) about an unmarried live-in couple facing the wrath of the society wasn't enough for their project at hand.
Farooki's embrace of an acting role wasn't easy either. "I was having doubts. I actually kept three professional actors ready till the last minute to play this character, all prominent actors in Bangladesh I am not naming. I told them I am in this dilemma and would you mind preparing for the role. All of them agreed. I am grateful to them."
Something Like An Autobiography, a Bangladesh-Germany-India co-production, found support from former National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) managing director Nina Lath Gupta, a co-producer of the film along with Farooki and Tisha. "I was a regular at NFDC's Film Bazaar in Goa," says Farooki. "Film Bazaar helped South Asian Cinema a lot."
Farooki, who calls his film "hyper-real" because "there is something real and something fiction and it is hard to say which is fiction and which is real", did the film's colour grading and sound mixing in Kolkata. "I now work with a studio in Kolkata. Earlier, I used to go to Mumbai, now I go to Kolkata."
The film's title hides a curious tale dating back to the start of the new millennium involving legendary Bangladeshi filmmaker Tareque Masud whose Matir Moyna/The Clay Bird was the first Bangladeshi film to be screened in Cannes, in the Directors' Fortnight parallel selection in 2002.
"Tareque Masud gifted me two books, both autobiographies, one of (Japanese filmmaker) Akira Kurosawa and the other of (British musician) Sting. He knew I was a fan of both iconic figures. The books stayed with me. When I finished making the film, it was titled something else I wasn't happy with and when the Busan festival selected the movie I decided to go back to my notebook where I had written down 80 alternative titles. The first on the list was Mother and the second, Something Like An Autobiography, the name of Kurosawa's memoir." recalls Farooki. "I stole Kurosawa's title. I was saluting the master."
Farooki, who has won awards worldwide and screened his movies at major international festivals, including in India, hasn't released a film of his own in his home country in the last half-decade. "I haven't had a film release in Bangladesh in the past five years," he laments. "I say I am in jail," he adds, referring to the allegorical arrest of his character in Something Like An Autobiography.
No Bed of Roses starring Irrfan Khan remains his last film released in Bangladesh in 2017. Farooki's following film, Shonibar Bikel (Saturday Afternoon), which had its world premiere in Busan, hasn't so far received the censor board certification and he chose not to sent his next, No Land's Man — also a Busan official selection in 2021 — to the censor board. Saturday Afternoon and No Land's Man are the first two films in his identity trilogy, which he began making in 2019. Memoria, the third part on Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in Bangladesh has remained a non-starter.
"We haven't started the production of Memoria," says Farooki. "The first two films of the trilogy were extremely political. Today, South Asia in particular and the world in general may not be a welcoming place for politically themed films. We live in a dystopian world right now," he adds. "Instead, I shifted my focus to male-female relationships. That is how Something Like An Autobiography and Last Defenders of Monogamy (the second in the 12-part Ministry of Love anthology on Chorki OTT platform) were born."
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