Home ›› 16 Jun 2023 ›› Back
Sutorang, one of the best assets of the Bangla film industry, won the second prize in the Frankfurt Asia Film in 1964. The film, a super hit during the then East Pakistan period, was also remarkable as it was directed by noted filmmaker Subhash Dutta and also the debut for renowned actress Kabori Sarwar.
Well-known music composer Satya Saha worked in the masterpiece while Ferdausi Rahman and Aliya Sharafi were playback singers. After years, the film was unfortunately lost as nobody had preserved a negative or a print for screening in the future.
In the mid-90s, the authorities of Bangladesh Film Archive (BFA), the lone archive of the nation’s cinematic past, struggled to find a print of the film. Even its Ekushey Padak-winning director or other crew members had no idea where the reels could be found. Subhash told BFA the last screening of the film took place almost 30 years back and he had gradually lost hold of the prints and negatives.
“He [Subhash] requested me to find the reels and inform him. He said he would be grateful if we could find that,” said Md Fokrul Alam, film officer of BFA. In the mid-90s, he was a young employee of BFA who just started his career.
“Azmal Huda Mithu, the owner of production companies like Salma Kotha Chitra and Joy Bijoy Kathachitra, had a non-Bengali staff member. I do not remember his name now. We learned that he might know where a copy of Sutorang could be obtained from,” he said.
BFA employees met the non-Bengali man every now and then to get a clue to where the film could be found. At one stage, he said there was a person named Prodip who had an intermediate negative of the film but no print.
“We met both men again and again till 2005 to convince them to give us the negative, and they finally did. Md Jahangir Hossain, the then director general of BFA, contacted Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC) and the present-day Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and managed to print the film from the negative,” Fokrul added.
The BFA office was then in a rented house in Dhaka’s Mohammadpur. Fokrul said they held a programme there to screen the film where Subhash and Kabori were present.
“I remember Subhash cried in joy after seeing his creation on the silver screen again. He never thought this could happen as all the negatives and prints of the film had been lost,” he recalled.
How classic films were collected
Ae Desh Tomar Amar is a Bengali language film of the pre-independence era, which was released in 1959. It was directed by Ehtesham. Another Bangla classic Onek Diner Chena (1964) was the first film directed by Khan Ataur Rahman. BFA has both films, which were recovered from a place nobody thought of.
Bangladesh Freedom Fighter Welfare Trust once had a film distribution company named Gulistan Films Corporation, which was shut down before 2000. BFA wanted to collect two classic films from the trust.
“We asked the trust to hand the films over to us, but they could not say where those were as they had already moved out of the building at Gulistan where the distribution company was located,” said Fokrul.
Gulistan Films Corporation produced blockbuster films like Shonkhonil Karagar that earned Tk 60 lakh in the 90s. But after closing the office, they did not archive the films.
“We kept searching. After some years, we went to a warehouse of Tabani Beverage Company, one of the entities under the trust which was a bottler of Coca-Cola in Bangladesh. At the warehouse in the capital’s Tejgaon, we found stashes of reels,” Fokrul said.
The reels included negatives of films like Ae Desh Tomar Amar, Onek Diner Chena, Shesh Porjonto, etc. But BFA did not find the whole film in many cases.
“This is how BFA collected many of the movies, posters, and scripts of different times and archived them,” said Fokrul.
BFA at present
BFA currently has a rich archive of 1,841 Bangladeshi films in 35mm, digital, and DVD formats as well as 1,199 films of Urdu, Hindi, and Bangla language used abroad. There are 215 more films of other languages in 36mm and 16mm formats in its possession. It also has 710 Bangladeshi and foreign short films as well as 3,651 documentaries and 1,574 news films.
Till December 2022, its total collection stood at 10,175. The process of collecting films and converting them into the digital format is also an on-going process at BFA.
Many films in celluloid collected by BFA have exceeded their lifetime. These are being converted into the digital format as part of the restoration process. BFA tries to upgrade the colours and edit the videos to make them clearer.
Md Zashim Uddin, director general of BFA, said they use chemicals to clean the print and scan with digital scanners during restoration. He said they have a team to assess the old prints and then choose the appropriate restoration process, adding there are skilled artists who can digitally paint lost or missing information.
“Our main problem is many old and classic films have not been preserved rightly by producers and directors. Many of them are not even interested in giving us a copy for restoration and archiving,” he also said.
Previously, BFA faced lots of problems as it did not have its own building and standard vaults for archiving old films at the proper temperature. The preservation process of both films and texts related to those was not proper due to structural problems as the archive had been operated in different government offices and rented houses since its inception in 1978. The hot and humid climate as well as the old structural design of those buildings ruined many collections.
Finally, BFA got its own building in 2018 and a budget to install equipment to convert analogue films into digital ones. The number of books and various materials collected by them and displayed in the extensive duplex library is now 69,175. Celluloid documents are stored in six state-of-the-art vaults with temperatures of -8, -4, 0, +8, +4, and +12 degrees Celsius.
Moreover, the new building of BFA houses an air-conditioned multi-purpose hall with 500 seats, a projection hall with 300 seats, a seminar hall with 120 seats, and the country’s only film museum.
“Now BFA is the proud archive of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s historic speech of March 7 as well as other celluloid documents important for the state; hundreds of posters, scripts, books; and rare cinema equipment. All this is in the museum,” said Zashim.
Collecting was not easy
In the 80s and 90s, producers used to have a budget of Tk 40-60 lakh. Filmmakers like Momtaz Ali and AJ Mintu had even bigger budgets. At the time, a movie would usually have 10-20 prints.
“We used to go to producers and directors personally and requested for a print to be archived at BFA. But most of them were not interested in giving us one,” said Fokrul.
Producers would spend Tk 40,000-60,000 for a print at the time. A super-hit film producer would get Tk 5,000-7,000 in rental fee from every cinema hall. Anyone giving a print to BFA meant he would not get that rental fee. Many producers were not thus interested in providing a print.
Besides, the concept of providing prints to the state archive for preservation was not popular among the cinema people back then. Eventually, many renowned works of Bangladesh’s film industry were lost as nobody had a copy of the prints anywhere in the country.
As a result, the collectors at BFA back then had to struggle to get a copy of cinemas. They went from door to door, requesting producers and directors. Finally, when they got a copy from them or managed to collect one that was already in bad shape.
Even for a cinema poster, officials had to struggle to convince producers and directors. One of the key reasons behind their reluctance was they knew BFA did not have proper archiving facilities.
But those who provided copies back then benefitted later. “They did not know the era of satellite television would begin shortly. We had well-preserved copies of their films. From us, they took copies either in analogue or digital format and sold those to television channels. Now people can watch many rare films on TV, and those were mainly preserved by us,” Fokrul said.
Since 2015, these films have been uploaded on YouTube and streamed on many other digital platforms. Some songs from old films are getting huge popularity among the young generation.
The collectors at BFA continuously collected reels, photosets, posters, 16mm and 35mm films, and negatives from producers and directors till 2013. But they faced a different type of challenge after that.
After 2012, traditional producers started leaving the Bangla cinema industry. All old production houses cut their number of cinemas every year.
“Production houses run by Masud Parvez, Jashim, Gazi Mazharul Anwar, and Dilip Biswas used to produce at least one film a year. But they closed their business gradually,” Fokrul said.
The number of cinema halls across the country dropped from 1,455 to 735 by 2010.
“When the digital era started changing cinema, renowned producers and production houses were already out of the scene. Gradually, unknown faces emerged in the industry, but they vanished within several years. We faced problems collecting films from them as most of them left the trade,” Fokrul added.
