There is an uncomfortable truth that both the development sector and the entertainment industry in Bangladesh have long avoided confronting openly.
For years, development organizations have invested heavily in documentaries, awareness videos, campaign films, and advocacy content. Many are sincere, technically strong, and socially important, yet most remain confined to workshops, donor reports, institutional platforms, or social media feeds where audiences quickly move on.
They often meet organizational objectives but rarely become part of the wider public. Meanwhile, mainstream cinema and OTT platforms continue focusing largely on romance, crime, thrillers, and urban stories, while the realities of climate frontlines, labour communities, migration, and marginalized lives rarely enter mainstream entertainment with commercial ambition or emotional depth.
Between these two worlds, development storytelling and mainstream entertainment, a quiet wall of misunderstanding has existed for years.
One myth inside the development sector suggests that audiences do not want to engage with stories of marginalized communities unless they are framed as “awareness content.” Another myth within parts of the entertainment industry assumes that films connected to advocacy or development themes inevitably lose commercial appeal and audience engagement.
Cha Gorom, a film by Shankha Dasgupta, co-created by Oxfam and Chorki with support from the European Union, challenged both myths.
Approximately a year and a half ago, Cha Goromwas not even a title but a restless idea and a question that kept disturbing me: Why are Bangladesh’s tea gardens always shown only from the outside?
For decades, films, advertisements, and tourism campaigns have celebrated their beauty yet rarely explored the emotional world of the people who sustain that industry. Over the years, I increasingly felt development storytelling needed a new language. We did not need another documentary that simply informed audiences but rather a commercially viable, emotionally engaging story.
That dream of going out of our zone eventually became the beginning of Cha Gorom. The journey was long and uncertain. We started with research, field visits, discussions, and endless conversations across Dhaka and Sylhet. Oxfam's leadership and the European Union's support encouraged the vision. Gradually, people began joining the journey: Redoan Rony, Jabed Sultan Pias, Masudul Amin Rintu, director Shankha Dasgupta, writer Saifullah Riyad, actors, actress, and eventually the entire cast and crew.
One of the most important turning points was shaping the storytelling approach. Saifullah Riyad understood early that the tea garden could not simply become a backdrop of suffering. From Oxfam, we provided all aspects -- research, community access, history, culture, lived realities, and multiple story angles, while consciously ensuring creative freedom for the filmmakers. Director Shankha Dasgupta then translated those realities beautifully onto the screen.
What audiences connected with most deeply in Cha Gorom was its humanity. Safa Kabir’s portrayal of Irene, a young doctor entering an unfamiliar social world, brought emotional vulnerability, curiosity, and empathy into the narrative. Through Irene, viewers gradually entered a tea garden reality they often overlook in everyday life.
Sarah Jabin Aditi’s Nandini carried a quiet emotional intensity that reflected the layered psychological realities of marginalized women without falling into melodrama. At the same time, Rezwan Pervez’s Robin Chand Murmu emerged as one of the film’s discoveries, bringing grounded realism, philosophy of life, emotional depth, and authenticity to the story. Mithu, played by Partho Sheikh, is charming, flawed, careless, philosophical, and deeply human.
Many viewers later wrote that these characters felt like people they personally knew. That is the true power of emotionally intelligent storytelling.
After its release, social media and mainstream media reactions became revealing. Some viewers appreciated the natural performances. Others highlighted the emotional simplicity of the storytelling.
Journalists, writers, celebrities, masses of people, and cultural commentators wrote positively about how the film balanced entertainment and realism without becoming preachy. Many ordinary viewers mentioned how the film made them rethink tea garden communities for the first time. Many appreciated the approach of Oxfam in the film production.
One viewer wrote something that stayed with me deeply: “This film did not make tea workers look helpless. It made them look human.” That sentence perhaps summarizes the real achievement of the movie. Because dignity matters in storytelling.
Marginalized people should not always appear only as victims waiting to be saved. They laugh, joke, love, dream, flirt, become frustrated, make mistakes, and carry emotional complexity like everyone else. And this is where the development of storytelling must evolve.
The future of advocacy communication cannot remain trapped inside expensive documentary models that only circulate within development circles. If social storytelling wants mass impact, it must learn the language of entertainment, emotion, and popular culture.
The development sector should not automatically view commercialization as the enemy of social impact. In fact, Cha Gorom proved the opposite with stories and further engagements with Robi and Revital Tea.
When audiences voluntarily spend Pohela Boishakh watching a film rooted in tea garden realities, advocacy has already entered public consciousness, living rooms, in a much more profound way than many traditional campaigns achieve.
For me, Cha Gorom journey also revealed another important lesson for Bangladesh’s creative industry. Development organizations should not be treated merely as sponsors or funding sources.
Organizations like Oxfam contribute far beyond money, including knowledge, field access, research, community trust, social understanding, advocacy insight, and human stories that mainstream cinema often cannot access authentically.
Similarly, NGOs must also learn to trust storytelling itself rather than trying to dominate narratives through excessive development and branding anxiety. Audiences do not emotionally connect with logos. They connect with truth, characters, emotion, and humanity.
In Bangladesh there are countless untold stories across climate change, migration, labour, gender, rivers, urbanization, and marginalized communities that can become mainstream cinema if treated with emotional honesty and cinematic intelligence.
Perhaps the real future lies in a new collaborative model where OTT platforms, filmmakers, writers, artists, communities, and development organizations work together.
Personally, Cha Gorom remains one of the most emotional journeys of my life. It has been about breaking a mindset: Breaking the myth that development storytelling cannot be entertaining, breaking the myth that socially meaningful cinema cannot be commercially viable, and breaking the myth that audiences do not care about marginalized communities, and perhaps most importantly, breaking the myth that social impact and mainstream entertainment cannot walk together.
They can. And Cha Gorom has proved it.
Md Sariful Islam is Head of Influencing, Communications, Advocacy and Media, Oxfam in Bangladesh.
