What do you know about women in Bangladesh? For most of you reading this, the answer is most likely “not a lot.” Some of you will recall awful garment factory fires and working conditions, and perhaps something about honor killings. But one woman—the sensational Rubaiyat Hossain—is working hard to make sure her compatriots are seen as more than just anonymous developing-world sob stories. Her award-winning films are bringing not only the plights but also the fullness and complexity of Bangladeshi women to global audiences.
Born in Bangladesh and descended from a highly regarded wali, or Sufi saint, Hossain holds several American degrees in film, women’s studies, and South Asian studies. This mix of life and academic experiences makes her especially suited to her chosen niche: filmmaking that is both decidedly Bangladeshi and decidedly feminist.
In fact, the fierceness of spirit depicted in her onscreen female characters is something she herself shares, the mere fact of being a female director in her country of origin requiring as it does great self-assuredness and courage (in addition to technical and artistic skill, which she possesses in spades). And it’s not as if she’s precisely been making things easy for herself, either; the topics explored in her films are hardly uncontroversial, especially within Bangladesh, dealing with women’s role in society, female sexuality, critiques of (masculine) nationalism, of (masculine) violence, of growth and development . . .
So now that you’ve got the gist, let’s take a closer look at Hossain’s films.
The first, released in 2011, is Meherjaan: A Story About Loving The Other. In the words of Khona Talkies, the production company founded by Hossain and her husband in 2008 “with the vision of using young Bangladeshi talent to produce films locally with foreign co-production” and “to work with themes that are otherwise silenced and marginalized”:
Meherjaan [does] away with the unitary masculine narrative in order to usher in an emotional multiplicity of feminine emotion and sensibility. This film critiques certain pitfalls of nationalism that create conditions to justify war, killing and violence. Finally, Meherjaan attempts to offer an aesthetic solution to war and violence by taking refuge in love and spiritual submission.
Meherjaan_Trailer from Khona Talkies on Vimeo.
Sounds good, right? Well the backlash to this new perspective on the country’s 1971 war of independence was swift and intense. Distributors were forced to pull the film from theaters just a week after its release. For too many, it was “too soon” to stomach such a challenging reexamination of deeply ingrained values and narratives. International audiences were thankfully less squeamish and received the film enthusiastically, leading Meherjaan, despite the domestic controversy, to be featured in several festivals and to garner a handful of awards, including the Tiburon Film Festival’s Orson Welles Award and the Best Critic Award at the Jaipur International Film Festival.
More importantly, Hossain herself was undaunted. Four years later, she released her second film, entitled Under Construction. Here’s her director’s note on the film:
The film revolves around the theater actress Roya’s journey in trying to reinterpret [Rabindranath Tagore’s political play] The Red Oleanders. She challenges the representation of the woman in the play and wants to make her contemporary. She situates the play in a modern day ready made garment factory. The workers have no name but numbers, they all work for a king who they never see. Tagore wrote this play as a [critique] of industrial civilization. The protagonist of my film at once demonstrates the political relevance of Tagore’s work in the modern day context of sweatshop labor, but she also questions Tagore’s representation of the woman as limiting and sets to free her from the cultural iconification.
I find Tagore's vision of modern day capitalism very apt and contemporary even though the play was published in 1926. When I look at Dhaka city, the working class population, may they be the rickshaw-pullers or ready made garment factory workers--I can see Tagore's vision of Jokkhopuri reflected--where each person is defined by a number and profit weighs heavier than human lives.
The modern Bangladeshi Muslim woman has not yet come into her full from having claimed her agency and subjectivity. She is very much still in the making. Dhaka as a city is going from the rural to urban, it is in transition, visually one won't find a single road in Dhaka where a building is not being constructed. As the city is literally and figuratively under construction so are its citizen[s], especially the women living there.
In other words, another ambitious project with strong critical and political stances. Not to mention gorgeous filming. See for yourselves:
Under Construction_Trailer 2 min from Khona Talkies on Vimeo.
Fortunately, public response to the film this time around was more unanimously positive. Once again, Hossain did the rounds of the festival circuit, bringing home even more, and more prestigious awards, including the Best Emerging Director award at New York’s Asian American International Film Festival.
Not one to rest on her laurels, Hossain is back at it again, working on her latest: Made In Bangladesh. What is this one about? Per a recent article in Variety magazine, “the film revolves around a young woman and her friends who struggle to unionize their factory, after a deadly fire.” The script is apparently so compelling, it’s already won its first award even before being released.
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Rubaiyat Hossain once wrote, “As a woman, I want to tell women's stories in my cinema, especially about those women who struggle like me in a patriarchal society.”
Now is a particularly great time to get to know those stories. Because happily, having the assistance of both Bangladeshi and European production companies, Made In Bangladesh will be released not only in Bangladeshi cinemas but also in select French, Danish, and Portuguese theaters, giving the non-Bangladeshi and non festival-going public a chance to enjoy Hossain’s work a little easier. So book your tickets now for Paris, Copenhagen, or Lisbon—or maybe, if you’re feeling mulitcontinentally ambitious or if you’d like a more firsthand look at the settings of these wonderful movies, Dhaka!