Film ‘Hoyto Kobitar Jonyo’ (In Poetic Hues) made by Bhubaneswar-based independent filmmaker Amartya Bhattacharyya will have its world premiere at the prestigious Festival De Cannes 2015 under the Court Métrage section in May.
The surreal short film has been shot mostly in the areas around Udaygiri and Khandagiri in Bhubaneswar while a few shots have been taken at Barang and in Kolkata. The film is produced by Swastik Choudhury, who is also an actor in the film, and all the cast and crew members are software engineers based in Bhubaneswar.
The film is a satire on the present-day society where creativity is killed every day, either by economic pressures or by political corruption. Even common men, suggestively shown as greedy opportunists, reject creativity since it gives them no tangible benefit.
It becomes extremely difficult for creativity (a Poem) to find its place. Poem, the creative spirit, has been personified as a beautiful and traditional young lady, who keeps searching for her Poet. She feels committed to him even though she knows that he is dead. Rhyme, another character in the film, depicted as an alter ego of Poem, is her only companion.
In her search for Poet, Poem meets Economy, Politics and Opportunists and comes to know that all of them have their personal motives to kill the Poet because creativity hurts them all in some way or the other. Poem and Rhyme, both committed to the Poet, move from their tormented present towards a dreamy past in search of their common lover.
The film is made with a budget of less than two thousand rupees and without any industry involvement. To cut costs and have better control over the film, Amartya himself shot and edited the film, apart from writing and directing it.
All actors in the film are new faces and software engineers like Amartya himself. Amrita Chowdhury, the lead actress playing the character of Poem, had earlier worked with Amartya as a choreographer and dancer in his Odia feature film Capital I, which was one of the six films in competition at the South Asian Alternative Film Festival, Paris, and was also officially selected at 13th Chalachitra Utsav, Bangladesh and West Florida Film Festival, US. Amartya’s second Odia feature film will start soon with the script being ready and the shooting scheduled to begin by May.