Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s films are about daydreamers longing for a better world. Their vagabond personalities inform Dasgupta’s cinematic style...
Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s films are about daydreamers longing for a better world. Their vagabond personalities inform Dasgupta’s cinematic style of long takes and tracking shots that unfold at a leisurely pace as the screenplay takes whimsical turns.
The latest film by the 76-year-old director, who has worked mostly in Bengali but also in Hindi, is no different. Anwar Ka Ajab Kissa, which is being streamed on Eros Now, stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as an eccentric Kolkata private eye. Anwar’s sleuthing dovetails into an investigation of the self that transports him to his childhood.
In a four-decade-long career, Dasgupta has bagged several National Film Awards in addition to nominations and wins at international festivals in Venice, Berlin, and Locarno. He is also a prolific poet in Bengali. The pandemic stopped Dasgupta from shooting his next feature film with Chandan Roy Sanyal, with whom he worked in Tope (2016) and Urojahaj (2019). Excerpts from an interview.
Why do you make films in Hindi despite setting and shooting them in Bengal?
I spent some years as a child in Kharagpur, where the culture isn’t totally Bengali. A chunk of the population was from the Telengi community, who came from Andhra Pradesh. It was in Kharagpur that I saw tiger dancers, who are folk artists who paint themselves as tigers...
