September 30th, 2009 •
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Director: Bishnu Dev Halder
Logline: Two sisters from a remote Indian village migrate to New Delhi in search of a new life while the third sister awaits her turn.
In the age of globalization, the world is moving towards becoming a global village, where the individual identity of nations and cultures is blurring with every passing day, and becoming the same. For good or bad, traditions and values of age-old societies are vanishing fast and making way for a single and global way of life.
‘A Tales of Three Sisters’ is the story of the coming-of-age of the traditional Indian society as it breaks away from its age-old ways of life to embrace the emerging new lifestyle. The film looks at the transformation of the Indian society at the very grass root level through the coming-of-age personal stories of three uneducated middle class sisters from a remote Indian village, as two sisters refuse marriage and escape to the city to live life on their own terms, while their youngest sister in the village waits for her turn to join her sisters in the city.
The changing face of Indian women reflects a change deep within the traditional, conservative, and male-dominated Indian society. It is the story of the coming of age of Indian women, who remained oppressed for generations, as well as the emergence of the Indian middle class, whose growth has been credited to be the force behind the great Indian economic boom.
http://vimeo.com/4999855
About the Filmmaker
Born in a family of East Bengal refugees and brought up in the bordering districts of West Bengal and Orissa, Bishnu Dev Halder, 33, was destined to be a filmmaker some day. Back in the early 1980s, Halder, a small village boy, used to assist his elder brother in occasional bioscope shows in their Remuna Colony refugee settlement in Balasore.
In the evening, the projector machines began to create magic on white screens attached to poles. Thousands of spectators watched in awe. “Those were Oriya films. It was a magic world and I wanted to be a part of that,” Halder says.
When Halder shifted his base to Sainik School Bhubaneswar, he developed a liking for art cinema. “It often happened that I was the only one in the hostel watching regional films like Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Bagh Bahadur on Sunday afternoons,” he says. Since then, he had his dreams fixed in the celluloid world. The family was supportive.
After passing out from school, Halder did a crash course in film making from a Delhi institute before opting for English Honours in an Orissa College. Halder got admitted at SRFTI in 2003.
“I had a strong initiation into documentary films here. Expressing real life situations has become a passion for me,” he says.
Bagher Bachcha (The Tiger’s Cub), his sensitive documentary on a boy living all by himself in the Howrah Station precincts, was the opening film of Indian Panorama (Non-Feature Category) in International Film Festival of India at Goa last November.
The film has won accolades in more than ten international festivals. At present, Halder’s hands are full with half a dozen documentary projects. An animation film on a little boy, a horse and Shahrukh Khan is on the anvil.
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