B'deshi director relives childhood thrill of visiting India

As a young boy, upcoming Bangladeshi filmmaker would Abu Shahed Emon would often leave his village very close to Takerghat border with Meghalaya, cross over to India without visa and take a shower there before returning home.
On November 21, 30 years down the line, Emon set his foot in India for the first time with a visa, reliving the childhood thrill, as his debut feature film "Jalaler Golpo" (Jalal's Story), portraying the story of a rootless boy who struggles to become a man with dignity in society, was screened in the South Asia Focus section of the International Film Festival of India in Panaji.

"I have travelled some other parts of the world. But I have never visited India. Therefore, I was really keen to visit here. I grew up a village near Indian border of Meghalaya named Takerghat. It is so close to the border that in my childhood I have crossed the border and go to visit some nearby places without visa.
"Back in those days it was kind of an adventure for the kids to travel to India and take a shower over there and comeback to Bangladesh. It took me 30 years to get a formal occasion to visit here in IFFI. I am truly thrilled by this fact," the director told PTI.

Thrill - that is the common feeling knitting together Emon's childhood adventure cross-border trips, making the film and his visit to Goa with his work.
Emon shot much of his film outdoors and the two persons who played the lead character of Jalal in the film are first-time actors Arafat Rahman and Mohammed Emon.

The film does have a star-studded cast in Mosharraf Karim, Moushumi Haimd, Taquir Ahmed and Mitali Das. The director said working with more than 300 extras who are just general people from a village was a "great learning experience".
"I learnt from their experience. It was a different directing experience," Emon said, adding he can understand the full import of the experience only after analysing after several others movies "because now I have no comparison about it".

If making "Jalaler Golpo" was a thrilling experience for Emon, the story idea for it was derived from a "deeply disturbing" media report of 2011 when in broad daylight, an unnamed boy accused of being a robber was lynched in an incident of vigilantism.
"The police had handed over the boy to the public who killed him on the spot. I had watched the video several times after it spread like a wildfire on the Internet. The story was highlighted in the newspapers for a while before it melted away from the media glare, dying a silent death just as the boy did when no one came to claim his body.