Aditya Vikram Sengupta wowed festival crowds and critics with his wordless movie Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) in 2014. Sengupta is among the 16 directors chosen to be part of the L’Atelier de la Cinéfondation, a talent laboratory aimed at emerging filmmakers from around the world. The Cannes Film Festival will run from May 11-122, while the Cinefondation’s Atelier will take place from May 13-19.
Sengupta’s project is titled Memories and My Mother. He will be part of a club that includes filmmakers from Algeria, Iraq, Argentina, Japan, Nepal, Spain and Turkey. “The Cinefondation’s Atelier hosts its 12th edition this year and will invite to the Festival de Cannes 16 directors whose projects have been considered particularly promising,” said a press note. “Together with their producers, they will be able to meet potential partners, a necessary step to finish their project and start the making of their film. L’Atelier provides its participants access to international co-productions, thus accelerating the film’s completion.”
The Cinefondation’s Atelier has an enviable strike rate: out of 171 projects it has nurtured, 126 have been released in cinemas.
Asha Jaoar Majhe is an adaptation of Italian author Italo Calvino’s short story The Adventure of a Married Couple. The dialogue-free film stars Basabdutta Chatterjee and Ritwick Chakraborty as a Kolkata couple who work in different shifts to make ends meet. The memorably shot movie was premiered at Venice Days, a parallel section at the Venice Film festival, in 2014, where it won an award for Best Director from the Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean.