BUHC and BUFC commemorate Victory Day with film screening
BRAC University History Club (BUHC) and BRAC University Film Club (BUFC) jointly commemorated Victory Day on December 18th. The event, titled “Cinema and 1971,” commenced with the screening of a short film, Dhor (2021) at Club Activity Room 1. In attendance was director Reza Ghalib, the lead actor Lucy Tripti Gomes, and author Dr Afsan Chowdhury (Adjunct Professor, ENH), from whose short story of the same name the movie was adapted from. The story was inspired by real events, but both the story and film presents them fictionally.
The author and the translator of the short story, Sabreena Ahmed (Associate Professor, ENH), reiterated before the start of the screening that the only Liberation War stories we think and know of are grand narratives. What we miss in between are ordinary, everyday stories of the individual. Dhor depicts this very phenomenon, as it follows a day in the life of one ordinary family during the war.
The short film opens with a Hindu family masquerading as a Muslim family in East Pakistan. The father is captured by Pakistani forces and promptly executed, serving as the inciting incident. The mother decides to retrieve her husband’s decapitated dead body — his “dhor.” She does so with grit and conviction, as she never sheds a tear throughout the film’s runtime. At the question-and-answer session after the screening, the director pointed this out with pride: “If the mother ever sheds a tear, the audience will no longer be tense; they will heave a sigh of relief.”
The mother’s immediate response to her husband’s death also carries particular significance; she erases her shidur and removes her shakha, and finally emerges as a human being beyond the deceptive Hindu-Muslim dilemma.
The aim of the screening was to break out of the mainstream binary, listening and observing the lived experiences of 1971. All in all, this event successfully encapsulated the real picture of wartime struggles, departing from the conventional portrayal of the Liberation War.
