'Eklavya' story coming up as Bollywood film

The Maharbharta story of expert archer Eklavya’s sacrificing his thumb and gifting it to his guru Dronacharya is the story of a movie from Bangladesh which is a contender for an award at the International Film Festival of India.

Winning an award at the IFFI is nothing new for Abu Sayeed, director of ‘Rupantor’ (Transformation) as he had won the special jury award silver peacock at the festival two years ago with his ‘Nirontor’, the story of a call girl struggling to keep afloat her lower middle class family.

The non-judgmental work also earned him the award for the best feature film a few months later at the Kerala International Film Festival.

And now, Sayeed, one of the most acclaimed directors of Bangladesh’s art house film movement, is back with ‘Rupantor’ that has entered into competitive sections of both the Indian festivals.
And why did he choose the Eklavya story from the Mahabharata? Well, as the director says, it is a subject that has been haunting him since he was in school but could find time and money to reproduce on the celluloid after having made two national award-winning short films and four feature films since beginning his journey in 1988.

‘Rupantor’, which will be world premiered at IFFI in Goa, transports the story in the modern context and showing how it prods a young film-maker into a “new quest”.

Arif, a young director aspiring to make a movie, turns to Eklavya’s story of sacrificing his right thumb which is essential to shoot an arrow. But while making the film at a Santhal tribe village in Bangladesh, the director is confronted with a new truth revealed to him by the local populace that the thumb has no role to play in archery and that the arrow needs to be held between the right index and middle finger.

Then why did Eklavya sacrifice his thumb? This sets off a new quest for Arif as the director pores over the realism of the past with that of the present.

In a sense, the content of ‘Rupantor’ and its film-within-a-film format is a throw-back to Sayeed’s previous film ‘Banshi’ (The Flute), made last year. The protagonist remains the same. In the earlier movie, Arif goes to a remote village to find two rich families there locked in a bitter feud, much like in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and in Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Little Girls Wiser than Men’.

‘Rupantor’ is not a period piece but the Mahabharata story has been adopted to portray the changes that take place in society and its value system under changed realities. The director describes it as “mingling of the realism of the past with the present”.

At a deeper but unstated level, it is Sayeed’s self-exploration. One of the main features of Sayeed’s films is that they are non-didactic. He does not allow his own view to be superimposed on the movie and he leaves judgment about character and search for life’s problems to viewers. But he makes sure that he makes the audience think.