It is a documentary with generous lashings of fiction and here is why. “I am trying to blur lines between fiction and documentary," said Tuhinabha Majumder about Aamaar Katha: Story Of Binodini, his 78-minute film on the nineteenth-century stage actress Notee Binodini. The film was screened at the Mumbai International Film Festival on February 2. “I don’t believe in the distinction. It’s a film; you can call it performative cinema,” Majumder added.
The idea for the biopic dates back to two decades. “I read about her, and her autobiography and the text spoke to me,” Majumder said. “It was like coded messages, full of secrets about her time, her work, her relationship with several men. The writing had a kind of ellipsis style at a time of male censorship scrutiny it had to pass through. It tells us many things and it does not tell us many things.”Notee Binodini was born to a prostitute and raised to be a courtesan. She began acting on the stage at Kolkata’s National Theatre in 1874 at the age of 12. Her career flourished under the mentorship of the theatre’s founder, Girish Chandra Ghosh. She enacted several mythical figures such as Sita and Draupadi, and was known for incorporating European aesthetics into her stage acts. The Bengal Renaissance glossed out her contribution to the arts in a bias stemming from caste and class prejudices.
“That is why her writing became political to me, and so I chose four contemporary theatre actresses to experience the text and create a dialogue between the past and the present – through their own body and movement, to record their performance and to relive the part of Notee Binodini on stage,” Majumder said. Maya, Trina, Prakriti and Satakshi each play a version and age of Binodini, reflecting on her state of mind.
The film blends jatra music with the paintings of Gogi Saroj Pal projected onto architecture from the Renaissance period to create layers of time through which the actors in the foreground perform to Binodini’s text from her autobiographies, Amar Katha (My Story) and Amar Abhinetri Jibon (My Life as an Actress). This multi-art ensemble creates a compelling visual narrative in which history evokes issues that women continue to face.
Majumder has previously won the Golden Conch for the Best Fiction Film and the Best Film of the Festival award at MIFF 2012 for Raater Bioscope and the Silver Award at the 11th Indian Documentary Producers’ Award for Excellence in 2015 for City Within The City.
Aamaar Katha: Story Of Binodini has received the Best Biographical and Historical Reconstruction film and Best Cinematography (Non-fiction) trophies at the 62nd National Film Awards, 2015.