Shireen Pasha, the writer and director of upcoming independent film You of Many Days, was recently selected at Berlinale Talents, an annual summit and networking platform of the Berlin International Film Festival for outstanding creatives from the fields of film and drama series.
The German filmmaker of Bangladeshi descent joined the summit via her movie You of Many Days, a love story that takes place during the second partition of India. The film is unique as Pasha has tried to openly incorporate the ideas of everyone that is part of the filming team, as and while it‘s shot.
Showtime caught up with the filmmaker to know more about her Berlinale experience and to find out her plans for You of Many Days.
How was your film project treated at the Berlinale Talents?
Berlinale Talents is really an opportunity for filmmakers to meet prospective collaborators and funders for projects. I had many one-to-one discussions with film fund directors and producers, some of who invited me to submit applications for funding.
What can you take through the workshop at Berlinale? Would you recommend other filmmakers to apply there?
The Berlinale Talents organisers are well connected and they really know what they are doing,intending to bring filmmakers together for the love of good cinema. They literally bring together all the funders for international cinema and world-renowned creatives from director Wim Wenders to composer Alva Noto, for intimate interaction.
I highly recommend all filmmakers to apply. It will help filmmakers understand the business aspect of raising funds, meeting future peer-collaborators, and established artists.
So far how has the open collaboration been coming along?
The project is still under development. Sometimes films take as long as ten years to complete. I don’t want to just throw something together that involves the hearts of so many people. Therefore, in this respect I am a long distance footpath warrior.
What‘s your plan now with You of Many Days ?
I will continue to search for funding for You of Many Days. I will be sending out funding applications, calling producers, and production houses.
As someone living so far away from Bangladesh, was it challenging for you to depict the South Asian aspects of the film?
My parents are from a village in Bangladesh known as Momarizpur. Life‘s meandering path took my father to West Pakistan as a young man, when he was sixteen, right after he had married my mother in 1960, to begin working at the Ministry of Commerce for Pakistan as a secretary (before the creation of Bangladesh). There he learned stenography and became so good at it that he became the Minister‘s personal assistant. Then he got posted to Poland as a secretary for the commercial service wing of Pakistan but then the war broke out in 1971 and he had to escape from Pakistan. My parents survived close encounters along with two of my siblings.
Once Bangladesh was created, he began working for the Ministry of Commerce in Bangladesh where he received the duty to help Bangladeshi Diplomats open their first Embassy in Tokyo, Japan. That‘s where I was born quite by chance and unexpectedly, to unassuming parents in 1977. After the first six months of my birth we moved back to Bangladesh where I lived until I was six, falling in love again and again with the beautiful dense, grey alluvial soil of our delta. Then in 1982, my father was again assigned to work as an assistant to foreign commercial officers in Washington, DC. Every week my father would ask my teacher, “Do you think my girl is intelligent?” He was told by many people in Bangladesh that his girl was dark and ugly and that he would have to pay a big dowry to marry her off but he didn‘t care about that - he wanted to know if she was capable so that he could find some way to stay in America to give her the education he knew he couldn‘t in Bangladesh.
Fate intervened again and in 1987 my mother was babysitting the child of a Trinidadian-American, who loved my mother and sponsored her to become an American resident, slowly making our path to becoming American citizens. We are reluctant immigrants, never wanting to have left our coconut, banana and mango trees. In these years, we continued to have one foot in Bangladesh and one in America. America for choice and economic strength, Bangladesh for heart and wings. It is with my heart and wings that I persevere in making You of Many Days.
