'Baksho Bondi': A film of knots and ellipses

Talking with the makers of the Bengali film, which recently premiered at the Berlin Film Festival

- Prathyush Parasuraman

Baksho Bondi (Shadowbox), a Bengali film shot and written by Saumyananda Sahi and directed by Sahi and Tanushree Das, premiered at the 75th Berlinale on 16 February. The film, rooted in Barrackpore in West Bengal, starring Tillotama Shome, will compete as part of the Perspectives section, a new category for fictional feature film debuts. Das, an editor, and Sahi, a cinematographer, put this film together with an army of producers, 17 including Shome.

Baksho Bondi trails Maya (Shome), a working woman threading through multiple jobs as her husband (Chandan Bisht), an ex-soldier suffering from PTSD, is suddenly not only missing, but a suspect in a murder investigation. This synopsis, though, is a misdirection, because there's not a trace of tension in the film. What Sahi and Das are after is, instead, a cinema of ellipsis—where the most dramatic moments that a character experiences exist in the gaps of the film, gaps which emerge in the surface not as expository dialogue or convenient flashbacks, but as twitches, gazes, hunched backs and pouted lips. The body is asked to speak.

In an interview, the filmmakers discuss their journey and method. Edited excerpts:

Tell us about the journey the story took.

Sahi: The first time Tanushree and I discussed making this film was in 2011-12. At that time the film was called Mother, and was drawn a lot from her memories of growing up in Barrackpore—an image of a woman with a bicycle, for example.

Das: A bicycle that is not only a mode of transport but also a kind of independence. In this film, when Maya confronts any animosity, she puts the bicycle between her and the other person.

Talk about Tillotama coming into this film and co-creating Maya.