On a summer afternoon eight years ago, Sandip Ray received a young Bangladeshi filmmaker at his Kolkata home. Arifur Rahman had travelled from Dhaka to meet the son of legendary director Satyajit Ray, whose works had drawn him to the world of cinema. Rahman had come with a peculiar request: to allow him to name a new film production house in Dhaka after Goopy and Bagha, the main characters of the 1969 Ray film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.
"Sandip Ray was very generous," says Rahman, recalling his meeting with the filmmaker in Kolkata. "He not only invited me to his home, but also said I could use the name of his father's movie characters for the production house I had founded three years before. He gave me a tour of the house where Satyajit Ray had lived, and showed the film posters Ray had illustrated himself," adds the director-producer trained in film production at the Busan Asian Film School in South Korea. "It was a fascinating experience to hold the posters of Ray films and listen to his son explaining them."
Founded in 2010 by Rahman and his schoolmate Bijon Imtiaz, Goopy Bagha productions has grown to become an independent production house that is well-respected in the international film festival circuit for its focus on the Indian subcontinent. Goopy Bagha has so far produced films in Bangladesh, India, Afghanistan and Nepal, partnering with young directors eager to tell stories from their backyard. "We launched the production house informally in 2010, and registered it under the current name in 2013," says Rahman, who lives in Dhaka.
Both Bijon (who uses only his first name) and Rahman knew they needed Goopy and Bagha, the characters created by Ray's grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury in a Bengali short story published in the children's magazine Sandesh in 1915. The passion of Ray's screen characters and the director's own genius gave the two young Bangladeshis something to put their faith in.
In the original story, dreadful musicians Goopy and Bagha are banished from their village because of their graceless singing. The tenacious singers, however, never give up. Ray made Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in 1969 followed by two more films in the series - Hirak Rajar Deshe (1980) and Goopy Bagha Phire Elo (1992) - the last directed by Sandip Ray.
Explorers of kinships
"Goopy and Bagha go from place to place weaving their magic. We come from Bangladesh exploring kinships," says Bijon, who graduated in film direction from the University of California, Los Angeles.
"I have watched Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne several times. It is an extraordinary film, like all Ray films. When I am under a lot of stress, I listen to the film's songs," adds Rahman.
Bijon and Rahman also felt closer to Ray, whose grandfather was born in Bangladesh's Kishoreganj district, a four-hour drive from Dhaka.
Going from place to place like Goopy and Bagha is also a leitmotif of the Bangladeshi production house. One of its upcoming projects is Solo/Eka, directed by Mumbai-based filmmaker Suman Sen. Set in Kolkata, Solo/Eka is about an insurance agent staging a one-man strike against a colossal statue of the common man to be inaugurated by the President of India in the city. "Art does not have any borders," says the Los Angeles-based Bijon about producing movies made by filmmakers from the subcontinent. "Making films is one way to share our experience. Our needs and desires are the same, our struggles too," he adds.
Sen says he wanted to work with Rahman and Bijon after stumbling upon the trailer of one of their productions. "I thought this is the language I am also trying to create," he says. "I got in touch with Rahman through mutual friends, and we instantly connected. The three of us are now more like family, like brothers," he adds.
At the Cannes film festival this year, Solo/Eka was one of the ten projects by young filmmakers from emerging countries selected to the La Fabrique Cinema programme of the French government's cultural arm, Institut Francais.
Scouring the subcontinent
Matir Projar Deshe (Kingdom of Clay Subjects) was the first feature film produced by Goopy Bagha productions. The 2016 Bangladeshi film directed by Bijon tells the story of Jamal, a ten-year-old boy who is robbed of his innocence when his childhood friend is forced to become a child bride. It won the Best Film prize at the Chicago South Asian Film Festival competing against films like Masaan by Neeraj Ghaywan and Hansal Mehta's Aligarh. "It took us five years to complete our first feature film," says Rahman.
It took the money donated by Rahman's father (he sold his land) and the large-heartedness of his friends to complete Matir Projar Deshe. Two top Indian film technicians - sound designer Anish John (Sacred Games, BellBottom) and cinematographer Ramsreyas Rao (Hello Zindagi, Bhindi Baazaar Inc) - worked on the project. "Anish and Ramsreyas are my close friends," says Rahman. "They came to Dhaka and stayed with us for one-and-half months during the project."
In 2019, they produced the Afghani short film Roqaia by Diana Saqeb Jamal about a 12-year-old girl - the film's titular character - finding herself in the middle of a media frenzy after surviving a suicide attack. Roqaia, Jamal's third film after the documentaries Twenty-Percent and Mohatrama, was an official selection at the 2019 Venice film festival. The production house is the co-producer of the forthcoming Indian feature, Amar Colony by Siddharth Chauhan, shot entirely in Shimla.
"The film was shot just before the pandemic," says Rahman. "Bijon and I met Siddharth at the NFDC Film Bazaar where his feature project was part of the co-production market. It is a story about relationships based on the residents of a colony of old wooden houses in Shimla," he adds. Another current Indian production is a documentary on the Sunderbans directed by Saurav Sarangi, who made the acclaimed 2012 documentary Moddhikhane Char (Char... The No Man's Island ) about a boy swimming across the Ganges to smuggle rice into Bangladesh.
"The mangrove forests of the Sunderans, which are spread across Bangladesh and India, are dying. People in both countries are affected and the Bengal tigers are losing their territories," says Bijon. Silent Echo, a short film shot in Nepal about four children living in aboriginal land near the India-Tibet border participating in a singing competition in Kathmandu, is in post-production.
Rahman and Bijon are confident their Goopy-Bagha spirit will find resonance in the subcontinent. "In his short story, Upendrakishore Roy Chowdhury recognised the ordinariness in human beings more than a century ago," says Soumitra Ranade, who wrote the screenplay of Goopi Gawaiya Bagha Bajaiya, the 2013 animation film based on the bumbling musicians directed by Shilpa Ranade. "We always celebrate excellence, but it is not just the excellence of a few people but the ordinariness of millions that makes this world so beautiful."
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