Political Undercurrents In Bangladesh's New Wave Of Cinema

A young girl from an ancient tribe in Chittagong tries to send a letter to her mother, who she believes lives atop a hill far away from her home; a filmmaker in her early forties struggles to tell her mother, who becomes conservative after her Hajj journey, about her relationship with a Hindu man; a private medical college teacher, after witnessing an unexpected incident, begins to protest against the system fiercely—these are some of the many intriguing stories that have been emerging from Bangladeshi cinema in the recent years. While India’s neighbour has been on the boil and the political events have taken a dramatic turn in the past two months, an upheaval has been lingering in the air for quite some time.

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Voices of Reason

Bangladeshi cinema has been a critical medium through which voices of reason have found a reflection. Its history goes beyond the formation of the country itself when figures like Shahidul Alam, Abdul Jabbar Khan, and Kazi Nuruzzaman came together to set up a film production company Iqbal Films in 1954, against the backdrop of the Language Movement.

In 1956, Iqbal Films produced its first full-length feature film in erstwhile East Pakistan: Mukho O Mukhosh, directed by Abdul Jabbar Khan. Since the formation of the East Pakistan Film Development Corporation in 1959, the film industry began to flourish, with movies like The Day Shall Dawn (1959) by A J Kardar, Matir Pahar (1959) by Mohiuddin and E Desh Tomar Amar (1959) by Ehtesham being some of the many critical films produced during this time. Post-independence, the Film Corporation was renamed the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation, and many successful films, including the celebrated Indian film director Ritwik Ghatak’s Indian-Bangladeshi production Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (1973) won international acclaim.

While the industry went through its ups and downs in the early 2000s, it is since the 2020s that a new wave of filmmaking has swept the cinema scene in the country. Filmmakers like Ashfaque Nipun, Abdullah Mohammad Saad, Robiul Alom Robi, Mejbaur Rahman Sumon and Kamar Ahmad Simon are some of the many new-age directors, who are not only taking their films to international platforms with vibrant and refreshing narratives but are also evolving a distinct film style and experimenting with the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction as well as conventional exhibition practices. The Covid pandemic period has given a new boost to the artistic oeuvre of these directors, as many of them have set out to explore film formats beyond the commercial cinema framework and consequently produced several interesting works.

The New Wave

The emergence of this new wave can be examined through three films produced in the last three years, each of which has a different language and transcends the boundaries of Western cinema’s genres. Kiori Pek Rau or Dear Mother (2023) by Sk Shuvo Shadique, Things I Could Never Tell My Mother (2022) by Humaira Bilkis, and Rehana Maryam Noor (2021) by Abdullah Mohammad Saad are films that have not only elevated Bangladeshi cinema to a global platform once again, but have also re-attributed a political undercurrent to cinema, which seemed to be drowning in commercial productions.

Shadique’s Dear Mother is a stunning piece of art that employs a theory that he claims to have evolved called the “Liberate Cinephile”. To defy commercial filmmaking and film exhibition setups, Shadique brought together several members from the Mro community to participate in the production of this film. Furthermore, the production team hasn’t resorted to ticketed shows of the film; instead, they are organising free public screenings as Shadique believes that “censorship shouldn’t apply to any art form”. The idea behind this attempt, he says, is to highlight the rampant commercialisation that is resulting in the “ethnic cleansing” of the indigenous population of the Mro tribe that resides in the hill tracts of Chittagong in Bangladesh.

The film is a work of fiction set in this milieu and narrates the story of a little girl from the Mro community, who wants to send a letter to her mother. The child’s grandfather had told her that her mother resides atop a hill far from her village, and the child is desperate to know when she will return. Considering the heavy militarisation of the area, the film was made using guerilla tactics, reminiscent of Latin American cinema in the late 1960s.

With minimal dialogues, the film primarily speaks through its visual and aural landscape, where the military presence is never overt, but always a backdrop in the story that surfaces through the recurrent gunshot sounds, the boots, the jeep tracks, and the violence left in the aftermath of its presence. The poetic stillness of nature in the hills and its constant violation by militarisation is what makes this film’s messaging loud and lucid, even in its silence.

Humaira Bilkis, on the other hand, uses the non-fiction medium in Things I Could Never Tell My Mother to tell her own story about her difficult relationship with her mother, which also becomes a reflection of the larger social dynamics of the Bangladeshi society.

Shot in the first-person documentary style, Things I Could Never Tell My Mother invites the spectator into the intimate world of the filmmaker as she navigates and debates the intricacies of her personhood, while trying to come to terms with the transformation that she sees in the person that her mother used to be, as a poet, and has now become, after undertaking the pilgrimage of Hajj. The film explores the conversations that are painfully familiar in South Asian homes with sensitivity, touching upon the themes of religion, gender, parenthood, memory, and societal norms.

Saad’s Rehana Maryam Noor, selected for the prestigious Un Certain Regard section of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, is only the second Bangladeshi film that has ever made it to the festival. Earlier, Tareque Masud’s Matir Moyna won the International Critic’s Choice award in 2002.

Rehana Maryam Noor, with its gloomy blue tint, sets the mood as claustrophobic and wrought with trepidation, as the eponymous protagonist, a medical teacher who witnesses her student being sexually assaulted by a colleague, sets out to wage war against the system. In the wake of the rape and murder of a trainee doctor inside Kolkata’s R G Medical College and Hospital, it seems as if the film eerily echoes debates that are rife in India’s current context. It highlights Rehana’s struggle as a woman who wants to stand by a survivor who is unable to speak about her experience.

Shot entirely indoors, the film emanates the sense of frustration that plagues the protagonist, who must not only convince her student to speak up, but also raise her young daughter to be unapologetic when it comes to defending herself against male aggression.

Bringing in elements of the thriller genre at various junctures, the film leaves the spectator submerged in discomfort with the challenges of reporting a sexual crime in a workplace, which women face almost daily. Through its visual style and haunting aural atmosphere, the film does a fantastic job of foregrounding how a deeply corrupt and power-driven system comes together to suppress such cases to maintain the hollow social prestige of such institutions.

Through these films, it becomes evident that a renaissance is underway in Bangladesh, both in cinema and outside it.

(This appeared in the print as 'Diverse And Fierce: Cinematheque Bangladesh')