A poet in private, an architect by training and a passionate after-screen speaker, Kamar Ahmad Simon, the award-winning, new-generation filmmaker from Bangladesh, who debuted on the silver screen with Shunte Ki Pao (Are You Listening!), is finally about to initiate his much anticipated project, Shikalbaha (Iron Stream). To inaugurate the shooting of the film, the production is now looking for new faces to cast in the venture.
The search for fresh faces just started on Thursday and production house Suchona has already launched a campaign on their Facebook page with details about what they are looking for. To depict the central roles of the film, two young male and a female actors are needed, in their early 30s. In addition to the three central characters, the crew is looking for another 47 characters ageing between 12 to 90 years.
Shikalbaha revolves around the story of two missing friends and their precarious yet uncertain quest for a river that has been lost. With Kamar Ahmad Simon in the director’s seat and Sara Afreen as the kingpin of production, the film is on the verge of it’s outset.
Simon, an auteur, is seemingly too devoted and attached to this particular venture, as in one of his interviews about the film, he said, “My film is completely personal. It’s a tale of a girl who is looking for a CNG at Farmgate, in the midst of a thousand people, yet lonely. The boy who is dying every moment, yet still seeking his identity in this city, Shikalbaha is the story of that boy.”
For his feature script Shikalbaha, Kamar was invited to La Fabrique des Cinemas Du Monde as one of the 10 young directors in Cannes 2014 and won the prestigious ‘World Cinema Fund’ in the Berlin Film Festival 2016. The script was also selected for the National Film Grant. Although, the title of the script was not the same then as it was changed to Shikalbaha from Shonkhodhoni (Silence of the Seashell).
“Sardar Fazlul Karim had translated Jean Paul Sartre’s novel Iron in the Soul and named it Shikol Ontore. When I was writing the script, I suddenly came to realise that the river flowing in the deepest corner of our hearts has a chain in it, the chain of Sartre. Only which can hear the sound of itself. Then again, the river that the two friends are searching for is also named Shikalbaha. So, I changed the name to Shikalbaha.”
The film is going to be produced by conjoint efforts of a cast and crew from four different countries. A number of cinema-professionals from Germany, France and India will be working in Shikalbaha alongside Bangladesh.
Interested candidates are requested to contact the production house at +8801672698612 and +8801716454060, for audition within March 26.