Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Tasher Desh’ suits my film craft: Q
Actress Rii in Tasher Desh
Ahead of the release of his film ‘Tasher Desh’, director Qaushiq Mukherjee (Q) said that Rabindranath Tagore’s famous musical drama suited his film craft because of its non-linear narrative style. Q said the allusions used in ‘Tasher Desh’, written in 1937, are very apt for his style because he likes to work with metaphors.
“Here I have retained most of the dialogues the way the writer had used 100 years back. It is essentially a Tagorean work and I didn’t tinker with that,” the filmmaker said.
The film has already been screened in several prestigious global film festivals. ‘Tasher Desh’ shows how romantic and advanced the Bard was in thinking. What he had foreseen in terms of liberation of women actually happened years after his death, he said.
One of the early movies of Q ‘Gandu’ was not released in India, but was a favourite in the festival circuit. The controversial film, made in 2011, was first screened in the Berlin film festival and it had made waves. He recalled having his first tryst with ‘Tasher Desh’ at the age of eight when he first heard it on an LP record.
“The female protagonist in Tasher Desh is a revolutionary, but the script does not have any explicit action scene, no firing, no bloodshed.
Actress Rii, who portrays the character of seductress Hortoni, a widow, in the film, said, “Tasher Desh doesn’t suffer from typical affectations of the 19th, early 20th century Tagore heroines.” Rii said she identified herself with the character which is endowed with femininity and modernity – something which has impressed the world audience at the Rome, Amsterdam, Toronto and other international film festivals.
An international co-production, ‘Tasher Desh’ is financed by NFDC, Overdose Joint, Anurag Kashyap Films Pvt Ltd and Entire Chien et Loup (Belgium) among others.
The film, to be released in 10 theatres here on August 23, had its world premier in the competitive section of the Rome Film Festival in 2012. It had its north American premier at the Scarborough Film Festival, Toronto in 2013.
