Synopsis
Ichche Dana
revolves around two women, one named Dana (Amina
Khan) who is Bengali and lives in a plush apartment
in Kolkata and Aina (Ananya Kasaravalli), a rustic
girl from a different state who worked as a labourer
in rural Bengal but was killed by the villagers
who labelled her a witch because when she became
pregnant, she refused to abort the baby. Dana
is a beautiful young girl who has lost her mother
while very young and has a rich father who is
too steeped in his affluence and his jet setting
business to care about what is happening to his
only child. Dana is a loner who lives in self-imposed
isolation and is alienated from the mainstream
so much so that she develops suicidal tendencies.
In one such suicide attempt, a young man saves
her life and urges her to keep on living, come
what may. He nurtured dreams of going to the US
and making it big. They have a brief relationship
and Dana gets pregnant. But the man is no longer
a part of her life by then. The film is an interaction
between the live Dana and the dead Aina who suddenly
surfaces in Dana’s life when the latter
learns that she is pregnant, urging her, arguing
with her, persuading her to continue with the
pregnancy and become a mother. Will Dana keep
the baby and find a new meaning in her life? Or
will she, like her dead alter ego Aina, abort
the child?
Rwita Dutta teaches political science in a suburban
college in 24 Parganas near Kolkata. She has also
been writing on cinema for several publications.
But then, the film bug hit her and she ventured
into filmmaking. Her first documentary Third
World has been screened at several festivals
across the world including the Reggio Calabria
in South Italy, in Egypt and at the Chennai Film
Festival in 2005. "The 13-minute film was
on a subaltern woman who carries dead bodies to
the morgue in manually drawn vans," she informs.
Wishing to extend her self further, Dutta has
just made her first full-length feature film Ichche
Dana. The film is based on her own story
and screenplay having come out of "the many
scripts floating around in my head for documentaries,
docu-features and feature films. I would not call
it autobiographical in a precise sense but it
would be right to say that the film is based on
an ideology that resulted from my realization
that there are many women in contemporary India,
who do not want to be trapped in the responsibilities
of a marriage, or to get tied down to a man, but,
at the same time, wish to experience motherhood
at first hand. You may perhaps call it a semi-autobiographical
film written directly as a script," elaborates
Dutta.
For funding, Dutta decided to form a cooperative
along with her friends who pooled in their resources
and decided to produce Ichche Dana under
the banner of Filmbuff Multimedia Service. It
is shot in digital for reasons of economy and
also because Dutta likes digital as a technical
medium and believes that it has a strong future
in cinema.
 The
more interesting part of the film is that two
absolute newcomers to Bengali cinema are portraying
the two roles of Dana and Aina. Amina Khan, who
plays Dana, is from Lahore, Pakistan and Ananya
Kasaravalli, who is from Bangalore, is playing
Aina. Incidentally, Ananya happens to be the actress
daughter of noted filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli
and is already a familiar face in Karnataka cinema
and television. Amina Khan is an actress who met
Premendra Majumdar, an active leader of the FFSI
and a friend of Dutta, at the Kara Film Festival
in Karachi where she was in charge of guest relations.
"He asked me to mail him my portfolio. I
liked the story and the character I was asked
to play and here I am," she says, smiling.
"I took a three-month course in acting at
Anupam Kher’s acting school, An Actor
Prepares, in Mumbai before we began to shoot
for this film. I have done one film in Pakistan
called Khali Haath in which I did the
main role and also wrote the lyrics, gave the
music and sang the title song without any musical
accompaniment," Amina details. Amina is fluent
in six languages – Bengali, Hindi, Urdu,
English, French and Italian! She is fluent in
Bengali and is speaking her own lines thanks to
her maternal grandmother who was a Bengali and
saw to it that her granddaughter familiarized
herself with the finer nuances of the language.
"Granny passed away in 1994 and though I
got the chance to brush up my Bangla only in 2004
when I was studying at the University through
my History teacher who had come over from Kolkata,
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my
Bangla has not rusted in the least," she
sums up.
What does Ananya have to say about her role in
this film? "Rwita had seen me perform in
my father’s film Nainaralu (In
the Shadow of the Dog). When we met at the
Bangalore Film Festival, she asked me if I would
be interested in portraying Aina. I liked the
concept of motherhood presented as the personal
choice of the woman and I said yes. Thanks to
my family that is steeped in films, my mother
Vaishali was an actress of repute, I am familiar
with the films of Ghatak
and Ray,
which developed in me a fascination for Bengali
cinema. I took up theatre purely as a hobby because
I graduated in psychology and wished to pursue
it further. But before I went to the National
School of Drama in Delhi, I began to get offers
for telefilms and serials followed by feature
films. I worked with Girish Karnad for a short
film Chidambara Rahasya based on a classic
by Purna Chandra Tejaswi. Soon, I found myself
assisting my father when he was shooting Hasina.
My character in Ichche Dana does not
have much dialogue. Besides, not being born and
bred in Bengal and being part of immigrant labour,
her Bangla is rather broken. I put in a lot of
homework specially on my dialogue because I hate
someone else dubbing my lines for me," says
Ananya. "I developed the character of Aina
keeping Ananya in mind and not the other way round,"
Dutta butts in.
The off-screen chemistry that evolved between
Amina and Ananya who lived in the same apartment
when they came to shoot in Kolkata went a long
way in establishing their on-screen credibility.
The film has been shot at different locations
in Kolkata before it moved to Taki along the Bangladesh
border. Others in the acting cast are Koushik
Chakrabarty, Sudipta Acharya, Gautam Mridha, Shankar
Mandal and Bishnu. The technical credits belong
to Tapan Bhattacharya (Audiography), and Shyamal
Karmakar (Editing).
The film has been selected for screening in August
at the 1st South Asian Film Festival on Freedom
in celebration of Pakistan and India’s 60th
anniversary of freedom.
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance journalist
who specialises in cinema and gender. She has
won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema
twice.
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