The latest exodus of Rohingyas, which started in August 2017, brought in a fresh batch of 7,40,000 refugees into Bangladesh. Like all major crisis in the world, this influx inspired filmmakers to make documentaries and fiction alike. On the International Migrations Day, we look back at two such films from local and foreign directors that were screened at festivals worldwide.
Amina, My Sister at Nepal Human Rights Film Festival
Nepal Human Rights Film Festival focuses on a theme each year. This year it was Safe, orderly and dignified migration. Every year, a few films from Bangladesh get selected to screen and compete in this festival. But unfortunately, even with the world’s worst migration crisis happening in our back yard, there was no film from Bangladesh. This is not to say that the Rohingya crisis was ignored altogether.
Amina, My Sister by British filmmaker Patrick Bodenham featured a personal story of a Rohingya family that fled Myanmar to avoid persecution. The film follows the family into the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.
The director, who worked at BBC’s foreign desk for six years, covering conflicts in Gaza and Myanmar, told Dhaka Tribune Showtime that he recently heard from Amina and is glad to say that she and her family are alive and well and in Kutupalong.
The director also spent a year in Myanmar during in 2012 when he “strongly felt that news coverage dehumanised Rohingya and distanced international audiences from the scale of the crisis.”
He said the situation inspired him to tell a purely personal story, showing the dignity and strength of Rohingya women and children - the most vulnerable of all in the crisis, deemed by UNHCR as EVI - extremely vulnerable individuals.
For online release, the director also shot four other short stories of characters briefly seen in the film. Some of them feature testimony of survivors of the Tula Toli massacre.
“I was profoundly affected by some of the things I saw during this shoot and feel a strong connection to this ongoing issue,” the director said.
Bangladesh was very much present at the festival even though we didn’t have any film this year. We had the largest delegation- a group of eight warm and energetic film professionals who had specific roles to play at the festival. For instance: I was a member of the pitching jury where a new documentary project received development grant.
Like every film festival I’ve been lucky enough to travel to as a jury member, the best part about the Human Rights Film Festival was the people. The organizers, the volunteers, the delegates- all became an inseparable family for that one week.
The curation of films at the festival was better than many other festivals I’ve been to. Or maybe these films are an acquired taste which I’m slowly developing.
Proshoon Rahmaan’s film at Global Migration Film Festival
Bangladeshi filmmakers produced numerous films on the Rohingya crisis this year. The documentaries were substantially better than the fictions.
One such documentary is Proshoon Rahmaan’s Long Period of Persecution. The director interviewed the local authorities, the international NGO officials, and covered all 360 degrees of the problem, with no singular focus. But the most haunting part of the film was the tearful accounts of the refugees themselves. The documentary will premiere at the Dhaka International Film Festival in January.
Proshoon had released a feature length fiction on the Rohingya crisis called Jonmobhumi (The Birth Land) back in 2018. After a short theatre run, this film was screened on December 10, at the Global Migration Film Festival in Cox’s Bazaar. It is currently the only feature fiction on the issue.
It was the first international film festival that took place in Cox’s Bazaar, confirmed the director.
“As one of the characters in my film puts it: ‘Hell is not so far from heaven’,” Proshoon told the Dhaka Tribune Showtime. “The festival was held only one kilometre away from the beach and 39 kilometres from the world’s largest refugee camp.”
A total of 18 films were screened at the festival. Out of those, there was only one film from Bangladesh and only one film on the Rohingya crisis. The director said half of the audiences were foreign and that the screening was followed by a lively discussion.
Proshoon is currently working on a documentary trilogy about the great film-makers of Bangladesh. The first film from that series was Fera (2012) on the late auteur Tareque Masud.