A Bengali film, Ahana (The Light Within), which will have its special screening on Wednesday, is about breaking taboos. One such issue the film deals with is male infertility and its impact on society.
The film with lead stars Joy Sengupta and Sudipta Chakraborty, has been directed by Promita Bhowmik. The film is the story of a young author, Ahana, who grapples with humiliation and compromise in a patriarchal society in her search for identity and self-discovery.
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For Promita, Ahana is her debut feature film. She says she has chosen to talk about male infertility as it is not only a problem in India but across nations. "It is spreading fast but it is not well addressed here. Infertility is still associated with women in India," said the former research scholar and teacher, adding, "Usually, we have the impression that people with less education have problems accepting women being appreciated for their work but that is not entirely true. In our patriarchal society, male fertility is hushed up and Rudranil, played by Joy, too tries to do that in the film. He is unable to accept his shortcoming. We have tried to show that he is also a victim of this patriarchal set up."
Joy is happy to do the film. "It is the kind of cinema I believe in. Here the director is the artist. So when Promita makes a film, she is driven by passion and love for the media. She does not see cinema any differently from poetry or her academic space. She uses the same artistic sincerity which she does in her personal media, of education. She is making a film with a feminist voice.
Talking about the director's treatment of the subjects in the film, Joy said, "She is not making it on the obvious feminist issues like we see in society, of women harassment or rape. She is making in subtle ways what really goes on in an educated, liberal middle-class household, and she is exploring patriarchy in a much nuanced way. I'm playing a part representative of patriarchy and yet a face which is liberal, educated, a professional face. The constantly changing dynamics of relationships interests me."
The actor, who considers theatre as his first love, says when he is doing a character which is opposite to the author-backed character, he has to create all the colours and shades to make the character full-bodied and understandable. That's where the challenge is for him.