A strong Indian connection characterises Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain's second film "Under Construction", a story about an aging stage actress's search for identity after she makes way for a younger actor to play the lead in a Rabindranath Tagore play.
The film, featuring actors Rahul Bose and Shahana Goswami in lead roles, is among the two feature films from Bangladesh selected for screening at the Montreal World Film Festival in the first week of September.
This is the second consecutive project of Rubaiyat, in her late thirties, that Indian actors find prominent roles after her controversial debut work "Meherjaan" (2011) featured veterans Victor Banerjee and Jaya Bachchan. The film had to be pulled down from cinema halls in Bangladesh following a major controversy over its story.
Both "Meherjaan" and "Under Construction" are women- centric and the reason for that is that "I am always interested in women's vision in cinema and women's realities. I find it very important for women's voices to be heard and women's visuals to be delivered. The unique experiences of womanhood are not widely represented in films, and most of the time women become the subjects that men represent."
"Self representation is important for women through their work to claim their own subjectivity and narrate their own versions of reality," Rubaiyat told PTI.
If "Meherjaan" is the story of a woman's love affair with a Pakistani soldier during Bangladesh's liberation war, in "Under Construction", we find the protagonist Roya (Shahana) playing the role of Nandini in Tagore's play "Rakta Karabi" ("Red Oleanders") for a number of years before being replaced by a younger actress.
As an uncertain future stares at Roya as a stage actress, she also has to face pressure from her husband, mother (played by Mita Rahman of Bangladesh), and friends to leave acting for motherhood and a housewife. But she has little interest in it and yearns for assertion of her independent identity instead of subjecting herself to the role and conditions imposed on women around her.
She gets an opportunity when she meets Imtiaz Ilahi (played by Rahul Bose), a Berlin-based curator who wants to represent Bangladesh for a series of European theatre festivals. Roya re-interprets "Red Oleanders", placing the play in a contemporary garments factory in Dhaka.
