Though the entire ‘nation wants to know’ why Katappa killed Baahubali, a lean village widow in white sari has kept the audience engrossed in her tiny world in a remote Bangladesh village. Director Kaushik Ganguly’s Bisorjon takes on a behemoth like Baahubali 2 and sweeps the best film award in the 62nd National Film Awards.
Only three films old in West Bengal, three-time Bangladeshi national award winning actress Jaya Ahsan is on her way to become the thinking man’s cup of tea. In West Bengal’s drawing rooms, get-togethers or filmi parties, the only conversation is how well Ashan has enacted Padma, the village widow’s character in Bisorjon.
“I took a small break before resuming work,” Ahsan grins, while checking a long list of WhatsApp and Facebook messages from her fans. Though Bisorjon is still running full house, it’s already behind Ahsan, who is busy promoting her first short film for the Internet, City of Love, to be released on May 18.
Directed by Indranil Roychowdhury, this movie follows the life of a lower middle class Hindu girl who marries a Muslim and escapes to the then peaceful Syria to start life afresh. “It’s a very universal theme, showing how war can take away everything from you and it can happen to anyone, anywhere,” Ahsan reflects.
She has deep sympathies for the more famous Bangladeshi face in India, exiled author Taslima Nasreen, who she believes deserves the right to visit her motherland. “You can hate her work, but it’s saddening if one cannot return to her birth place,” she says.
Ahsan’s work in India and Bangladesh shows how different each of the characters that she played is. Hailing from a family of freedom fighters, she had no connection in the film industry. In her films during her 10-year TV stint in Bangladesh, she always experimented, playing bold roles of a prostitute, a tramp, a theatre actor, and bagged her first national award in Bangladesh for playing Bilkis Bano, a freedom fighter, in Nasiruddin Yousuff’s big budget film Guerilla, followed by two more. Her film Gorom Bhaat is a part of the text in Film and Television Institute of India, Pune.
How different is the work culture here and in Bangladesh? “Here it’s much more professional. In Bangladesh, we have problems in execution and we lack in infrastructure, but the stories are rich and versatile. There are opportunities to play a lot many different characters. But the commercial films there are worse off than here; they are very poor copies of the Tamil versions,” she laughs.