Ritwick Chakraborty and Anirban Bhattacharya to share the screen in Joyraj’s Bisarjan

Independent filmmaker and theatre personality Joyraj Bhattacharjee have adapted Rabindranath Tagore’s Bisarjan to make a feature film that will portray Ritwick Chakraborty as the iconic character Raghupati. The film will also have Anirban Bhattacharya in a special appearance. Sounak Kundu of Cat Sticks fame will be seen as Joysingha. Musician Arko Mukhaerjee composed the background score. Besides, Angela Mondal will be seen as Aparna and Srabanti Bhattacharya as Gunabati.

Tagore’s Bisarjan deals with religious conservatism. According to the director, choosing this text is to show how a classic becomes contemporary. Talking about the film, Joyraj said, “What Tagore captured years ago is still relevant in our society. The communal conservatism that the author has written in the text is relevant in today’s context in our country and that’s why I deliberately avoided changing the dialogues. I kept Tagore’s style of using verses as dialogues. That is almost intact in my film.”

Jayraj and his team shot the film in June. A portion of the film is shot in Purulia and we experienced heavy rainfall there. Interestingly, since Tagore’s original novel Rajarshi and the play Bisarjan both mention the month of Shravan (month of monsoon), we have incorporated the rain in our film. The shooting was done before the schedule and now we are preparing for the post-production. We have a different plan to experiment with the colour correction,” the director said. Filmmaker Pradipta Bhattacharyya will be editing the film.

The film is an independent initiative by Joyraj and his friends. “Arko has helped us a good deal in making,” he said. Joyraj’s previous film Ghyachang Fu is also an independent film. It features Anirban as one of the key characters. While it has not been released in theatres, the film travelled to several festivals across Europe. “It was a conscious decision to not apply for a censor certificate because it would suggest a lot of editing. Meanwhile, the film has been screened at many fringe festivals and film clubs, especially in Europe. This film, however, will have a theatrical release and we are expecting to complete the work by the end of this year,” Joyraj told us.