Exclusive! Arindam Sil: Parasite influenced me deeply while making Tirandaj Shabor

Arindam Sil has his hands full. After two back-to-back releases – Mahananda and Tirandaj Shabor – he will begin shooting for Byomkesh O Hatyamancha from June 1. In a candid chat with OTTplay, he talked about his releases and his experience of making the fourth instalment of Shabor.

Excerpts below:

You have multiple releases this year…

Yes, there are six releases. Mahananda was released in April. Tirandaj Shabor will be released now. Then there is Rituparna Sengupta and Abir Chatterjee’s Maayakumari. From June 1, we will be shooting Byomkesh O Hatyamancha, which is slated to release in August. Then we have Khela Jokhon and Iskaboner Bibi.

Tell us about Shabor. What took you so long for the fourth instalment?

I did not want to do the fourth instalment at all. For any franchise – be it Shabor or Byomkesh – it becomes difficult to bring something new in terms of creativity after two-three films. Satyajit Ray made only two Feluda films – Sonar Kella and Jai Baba Felunath. Yes, he decided to give up on the Feluda series after Santosh Dutta, aka Jatayu, passed away. But there were other Feluda stories without the character of Jatayu. Anyway, I felt I was done with Shabor. But evidently, my audience could not let it go. The number of requests that I got for Shabor, and Mitin Mashi, is overwhelming. Then one day, Shirshenduda (Mukhopadhyay, novelist and creator of the character Shabor Dasgupta) called me up and said that he found a new Shabor novel that is lesser-known and almost forgotten. I was travelling. Soon after I came back, I met him, read the story, and locked it with my producer.

Tell us about the shooting.

Something very interesting happened during our pre-production work. This story is about marginal people living in slums. We scheduled our recce from Dum Dum towards south Kolkata. Despite our search, we could not find a proper location. When we almost gave up, someone from the team took us to a slum at Rahim Ostagar Road, Jodhpur Park. It was just perfect. I could see the exact location I imagined in my head. Meanwhile, local people got curious. One man came to me and asked if we were working on something written by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay. When I said yes, he showed me a building adjacent to the slum and said that was the place where Shirshenduda used to live. When I called him, I realised he probably had set his premises of this novel around this area. That was a magic moment for me. We shot the film almost at the real location that the author had imagined while writing.

What makes this film special for you?

This Shabor talks about marginal people. Every moment I worked on this film, I remembered Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. This Shabor is also a human story. I used to watch the people in the slum and their livelihood and every single day of shooting I carried the discomfort of poverty. I saw that life so closely that it bothered me for a long time even after the shooting was completed.

Tirandaj Shabor releases in cinemas tomorrow.