Alliance Française de Dhaka is showing photographs from 'An Apple Tree Inside the Head,' the unreleased feature by director Fazly Rabbi Mridha.
The film itself has no release date. What's on view instead are stills taken during its production. Images are meant to stand in for a story a visitor will never actually watch.
The exhibition is presented by Goopy Bagha Productions Limited and Views & Vision Production.
It opened on 15 September. The opening drew anthropologist Dr Manosh Chowdhury, actor Jayita Mahalanobish, and independent filmmaker Josim Ahmed, who produced the film and founded Views & Vision.
The premise is the unusual part. There's no screening, no trailer, just photographs from the shoot, chosen to suggest mood and character without giving away plot.
Producer Arifur Rahman has said the decision came out of frustration with how conventional distribution works, arguing it doesn't always get a film to its widest possible audience.
The exhibition, in his framing, lets people "walk into a room" and encounter the film on entirely different terms. It will build their own sense of it rather than being told what it is.
That's a workaround worth noting on its own terms. Bangladesh's independent film scene doesn't really have a template for this. The usual route is festivals, censor clearance, then a theatrical or streaming release, assuming one comes at all.
Showing production stills before the film exists anywhere else is a bet that a story can travel and build some appetite for itself through images alone.
The film's plot leans on the oldest story going: Adam, Eve, and the apple. Mintu Mridha is convinced his wife Jasmin and son Shohag have been possessed by something. They've taken to wandering off without explanation, moving through their days like they're somewhere else.
He goes to a saint, who gives him a blessed apple, said to heal. He doesn't eat it. It just sits there. As things keep repeating in ways he can't explain, the apple starts to read as "cure," "temptation," and "omen" all at once, and the line between what's supernatural and what's simply psychological breaks down.
It's that unresolved quality the exhibition seems built to carry over.
An apple that means several things at once: a family that might be haunted or might just be unwell. The photographs aren't standing in for the plot; they're an attempt to hold that ambiguity in a single frame, the way a film would hold it across two hours.
This isn't new territory for Mridha. His previous feature, Payer Tolay Maati Nai, won the Gautam Buddha Award for Best Feature Film at the 5th Nepal International Film Festival and picked up a Special Jury Mention for Best Debut Film at the 7th Jaffna International Cinema Festival in Sri Lanka.
Both films share an interest in what's happening inside a character's head rather than in front of the camera.
Three producers are credited on An Apple Tree Inside the Head: Bijon Imtiaz, Arifur Rahman, and Josim Ahmed.
The organizers describe the project as part of a push to get auteur-driven South Asian films in front of international audiences. Whether the film ever reaches a festival, a theatre, or a streaming platform is still an open question.
An Apple Tree Inside the Head runs until September 19 at La Galerie, Alliance Française de Dhaka, 26 Mirpur Road, Dhanmondi. The exhibition is open to all, daily from 3pm to 9pm.