Koh-in-noor; the light from Bengal

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The glass doors of Kairali theatre were already flooded with film posters; small, big and loud ones in varying colour tones too. In front of the entrance door stood a man and woman, both short-statured, their eyes darting through the posters and their hands holding a rolled up glossy sheet. Few seconds tick on and their hunt succeeds. They find some space at the bottom of the door and they unroll their poster to reveal the picture of a lad with a vacant expression and beneath his picture the title reads ‘Koh-i-noor’.‘’This is my first independent work. It is going to be screened today,’’ Saikat Mallick, the Kolkata-based director cum film-lecturer, does not conceal his joy while pasting all the four edges of the poster carefully. He is in the city for the Fourth International Short Film and Documentary Festival with his documentary film on an eight-year-old Bangladeshi lad named Raqeeb Ul Hassan, a projector-operator at a town called Chandpur, nearly 120 km away from Dhaka. His friend Ankita Ghosh, also hailing from Kolkata, is pleased after they had found some space for their work on the glass doors. The director has spent almost half of his earnings as a teacher to fashion ‘Koh-i-noor’ which he has shot, edited, produced and directed all alone. He calls his film an ‘innocuous accident’. Saikat spotted Raqeeb during one of his visits to Chandpur in search of an ideal location for his feature film. He had written a script and he wanted some snaps of the location. When he got exhausted, he went to a theatre. The film was boring and he wanted a puff desperately and in the meantime he managed to sneak up into the projection room.‘’There I saw a lad no bigger than the cans that carried the film rolls. He was the operator and he was loading a spool of film. I took some snaps and returned not even thinking about the possibility of a film.’’ Back in Kolkata, Saikat felt like showing the boy’s pictures to a lot of people. The comments he heard and the remarks they passed took him back to Raqeeb and this time with a Sony HD camera. He returned with a seven-hour-long, unedited tape which he wanted to turn into a documentary. ‘’But I had no money to rent a studio. It was then that Ankita offered help by lending her editing suite at her creative agency,’’ says Saikat.The film begins with the still image of the boy and moves on juxtaposing stills and moving shots. As the 37-minute film rolls on to its end, some of the grave issues of child labour, exploitation and poverty are thrown up. ‘’I never wanted to make a film on child labour. In fact, this film was an accident, as I said. But as I started working on it, I felt a sense of purpose and meaning,’’ says the director. He has even put the title meaningfully. ‘’’Koh-i-noor’ means ‘light from the mountain’. It has semblance to a projector that fires light on the screen inside a theatre,’’ he explains. Although he is almost drained out with his first work, Saikat smiles about monetary affairs. ‘’I teach films for money and I spend that money for my films,’’ says Saikat, a FTI graduate and a guest lecturer at the West Bengal State University.