He connects with animals, thinks that’s where he belongs. Goja is a postman, he was a wife and suddenly one day he has an epiphany that all this is pointless. All his films are about these dreamers, who don’t fit into these societal boxes. I thought the character was very Darwinish. Every morning I used to climb up the tree and come down for lunch - which would often be rice, dal and omelette - and go up again. We were in Purulia for two weeks for the shoot. My character is of a postman who renounces everything and goes and joins monkeys and starts living with them in a tree. It was a 5 minute call, during which he asked me if I am afraid of monkeys. He introduced himself and I was starstruck. We had a Skype call-me in Venice, he in Kolkata. Dasgupta’s daughter, Alokananda, the composer, and I have a mutual friend he told me that Dasgupta wanted to speak to me. Years later, Dasgupta would approach me for a role when I was in Venice for the film festival for my film Island City. A production still from one of Dasgupta’s shoots A whole new world of films had opened up. A few years later, I was watching films at the British Council or the French Embassy in Delhi, or using the student pass to watch as many films as possible in the film festival. I must have seen Dasgupta’s Uttara on one of those Sunday afternoons. I wouldn’t understand them, but I would watch them nevertheless, sometimes dozing off, and waking up again. Their films would play on Doordarshan on Sunday noons. It also opened up these other kind of films-Ghatak, Ray, Adoor, Shaji Karun. I was interested in Tahader Katha only because my favourite actor was in it, and I realised it’s a totally different world: I could feel the difference in Mithun’s acting in this film, which was real and stark. I didn’t understand the language of Buddhadeb Dasgupta. As a child, I obviously didn’t understand things like direction, camera, editing. I waited to watch the film until it came on Doordarshan. There were film magazines like Mayapuri and it’s in one of those that I first read of Tahader Katha. It used to have everything from porn magazines to Reader’s Digests to foreign magazines, and I used to look at everything. One of my uncles used to own a little book store and I would sometimes help him out in the shop after school. One of my fondest memories is of him taking the whole family - 25-30 of us - to watch Andha Kanoon on a very rainy day.
Mithun bengali movie andha kanoon movie#
Our family was movie crazy, particularly one of my uncles.