10 Titles Proving That 2021 Was a Great Year for Bangladeshi Cinema

Tareque Masud’s “Matir Moina” (2002) was the first film from Bangladesh that was screened in Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight section and won the FIPRESCI award jointly with Elia Suleiman’s “Divine Intervention”. But it is Abdullah Mohammad Saad’s second feature “Rehana Maryam Noor” (RMN, 2021), the first film from the South Asian cinephile nation to be officially selected at Cannes, competing in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ category. The director of the film also bagged the Jury Grand Prize from Asia-Pacific Screen Award where the lead actress Azmeri Haque Badhon earned the award of the Best Performance by an Actress. Badhon was also included in the short list of ‘Variety’s International Breakout Stars of 2021’. Bangladeshi actors Chanchal Chowdhury, Mosharraf Karim and Badhon have expanded their stardom in 2021 by acting in web series released in Indian OTTs. Jaya Ahsan continued her already established acting career both in Dhaka and Kolkata-based Indian industry. 

RMN was not only one commendable Bangladesh’s international success in 2021. Kamar Ahmad Simon’s fiction-looking non-fiction “Day After…” represented Bangladesh in competition at the high-ranking festival, IDFA: International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam. The prestigious Busan Film Festival 2021 got three submissions from Bangladesh – Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s international film “No Land’s Man”, Mohammad Rabby Mridha’s debut feature “No Ground Beneath the Feet”, and RMN. After visiting the festival circuit in 2020 in London, Busan, Guttenberg, Singapore, Seattle and Turin in 2020, Rezwan Shahriar Sumit’s “The Salt in Our Water” got theatrical release in 2021. “Rickshaw Girl” is a new kind of experience for any Bangladeshi film since a US independent producer approached Bangladeshi director Amitabh Reza Chowdhury to make a film for them. 

Book Review: Cinema of Bangladesh: A Brief History (2020) by Fahmidul Haq

 By Panos Kotzathanasis 

The “story”, after highlighting the concept of “brief” mentioned in the title as a panoramic view on local cinema, begins with some general facts about the current situation of the industry, as much as audience tendencies regarding motion pictures. The next chapter deals extensively with the beginning of Bangladeshi cinema, a topic that is always hot no matter which country’s movies it refers to, but is even more complicated regarding Bangladesh, which was first a part of India, then of Pakistan, before it became independent. As such, Haq captures the story from the first exhibitions of East Bengal, eventually arriving to the name of Hiralal Sen, as he was the first film exhibitor, filmmaker and founder of the first cine-company in East Bengal, also commenting on why his film is not considered the ‘first’. The story of Sen emerges as one of the most interesting in the book, as it is intensely bound with the beginning of local cinema. Haq then brings us to the Nawab Family and the formation of the Dhaka East Bengal Cinematograph Society and their first titles, of which “The Last Kiss” takes center stage. 

The next chapter tracks the history of mainstream cinema with the name of “Mukh o Mukhosh” coming to the fore, with Haq dedicating a large part of the book both on the film and its director Abdul Jabbar Khan, also adding facts about the history of Bangladesh, which, undoubtedly, had an impact on local cinema as well. The creation of East Pakistan Film Development Corporation (now BFDC – Bangladesh Film Development Corporation) emerges as a rather important event in this chapter also, with the rest exploring cinema pre and post the Liberation War, essentially to today. A number of chapters emerge as rather interesting here. The 70s in particular offer a fascinating decade regarding cinema, with Haq following Alamgir Kabir’s classification of war, plagiarized, non-plagiarized and offbeat films, adding, however, two of his own, costume epics and gangster-based action movies. Also of note here is the reference to Nagisha Oshima’s documentary, “Rahman: Father of Bengal”, a very little known part of the Japanese filmmaker’s oeuvre. The surge of Urdu-language movies, the demise of the mainstream industry and the rise of the independent one, particularly due to the surge of B-grade ultra-violent titles that included soft porn scenes brings us to the next chapter, which deals almost exclusively with indie cinema. 

Bangladeshi cinema: Rise, decline and global

As Bangladesh reaches 50, its cinema is finally moving onto a global stage.

Bangladesh has both a substantial film culture and a modest film industry established in the middle of the 1950s. The industry finances were sound in the late 1960s and 1970s but started declining in the 1980s and 1990s. In the new millennium, the industry declined even further, but there have been some recent signs that the industry is reviving with a major contribution from the independent sector.

1970s: A vibrant industry

Immediately after the country’s independence in 1971, a new class of producers emerged. Some people suddenly became rich in this new disorganised country and started to invest in the film industry. Some saw it as a way to transform their black money into white, while others saw cinema as a means to make a lot of money in a short period of time. Because of the nature of the invested money, some negative elements entered into the industry — with plagiarised storylines one of them.

During this period, cinema arrived as the main entertainment medium for the new nation. The industry was vibrant and the business was good. The Pakistan government had stopped importing Indian films after the 1965 war and after independence, the government of Bangladesh stopped importing all South Asian films, including both Indian and Pakistani films. Only Bangla films were exhibiting in theatres with hastily made films sufficient to fulfill the public demand.