The much longed Saturday Afternoon

 

Movie title: Saturday Afternoon/Shonibar Bikel
Director: Mostofa Sarwar Farooki

Ever since the movie was released in 2019, as a Farooki fan, the long wait to watch the movie in Bangladesh started. I was a student at that time. I used to download, browse free movie websites torrents as those were my only means to watch a movie for free. Now I can pay for watching a movie and am willing to pay to watch a movie of my favorite director, but the movie is not released to my country yet.

It was recently released to a neighboring country though. One day I was doing one of my desperate hunts to find the movie and voila, I found it on a movie website. And I kept myself free one Saturday Afternoon, to watch the much longed Saturday Afternoon.

It’s a thriller drama with a hostage situation. One Saturday afternoon in the Ramadan month, a restaurant in Dhaka was attacked by a group of extremists. Their targets are non-Muslims. They think they are preaching Islam by their acts. They separate the foreigners and Bangladeshis into two separate spaces. Then the hostages were held for a few hours and the drama began.

So it’s just a hostage situation, why was the film banned in Bangladesh… Yes, it showed a group of extremists hijacking a restaurant and showing the execution of foreign nationals. But in a free country, I don’t see a reason to ban such a movie. The movie did not only show the wrong-doings of extremist people, it showed how average people can do the right thing in an extreme situation. It showed the power of Bangladeshi people. Of course a fraction of the population of any place may behave violently, but that’s not the full story of neither the movie, nor my country. People wearing jeans and people wearing hijab are cooperating together, religious and non-religious folks sit under the same roof in a corporate space. And this is the truth. I have a hunch that the autocratic government we had was trying to keep a hold of directors by restraining their courageous work from coming to public. A good movie only makes your country look good, but a good director was a risk for the autocratic regime.

It was a one shot movie, one camera recorded the whole drama in one go. Interesting to watch. I would argue that in an attempt to create a one-shot film and also a courageous story, Farooki left a gap in both the dimensions. I would have preferred if it was a more stunning one shot film or if it was a more dramatic story. Somewhere I was missing that Farooki from Bachelor, or from Television.

The cast made me excited! All my favorite artists in one frame. I would give credit to Farooki for keeping the acting real, in a real hostage situation, I would not expect the characters to act in a pattern, you know. But I just felt, the characters could be developed more.

My anticipation was for too long, so my expectation was not met fully. I missed an intensity of contents in the film. But now at least my desperate feeling is gone…

I hope Farooki will surprise his fans with great works in the new Bangladesh and I hope we can watch all his works without any ban.