After 2011’s “Nobel Thief,” 2012’s “Uncle Shyamal Turns off the Lights,” 2015’s “Peace Haven,” 2016’s “Mi Amor” and 2019’s “Aadhaar,” Indian filmmaker Suman Ghosh returns again to the Busan International Film Festival.
“The Scavenger of Dreams” has its world premiere in the ‘A Window On Asian Cinema’ strand. A treatise on social inequality, the film follows Birju (Shardul Bhardwaj, 2019 Mumbai Film Festival winner “Eeb Allay Ooo!”) and Shona (Sudipta Chakraborty, Ghosh’s “Searching for Happiness…”), trash collectors who live in a Kolkata slum with their young daughter. They scour the city’s affluent areas by day for garbage and their experiences become the grist of stories for their daughter by night.
Like “Aadhaar,” “The Scavenger of Dreams,” then called “The Waste Collector,” was also at Busan’s Asian Project Market, where it gained significant exposure. The germ of the film was from a New York Times article about waste collectors that Ghosh read years ago that stayed with him.
“The reason I wanted to make the film was that the fact that we are in a world which is very modernized and globalized, where we talk about GDP and growth of individual countries, but a large section of people is left behind in this race towards modernization, and through the story of the waste collectors I wanted to highlight that,” Ghosh told PvNew.
The filmmaker said that his intention was to create empathy towards his protagonists and conveyed that to his cast. “Suman was very clear from the beginning that we needed to evoke empathy rather than sympathy for Birju,” Bhardwaj told PvNew. “I agreed with Suman wholeheartedly because trying to evoke sympathy is dishonest and patronizing. I think me and Suman have the same worldview where inclusivity is paramount. So, a lot of things were unsaid and yet understood. He is one of the most egalitarian men I have ever met. It shows through in his work.”
The cast and crew spent a lot of time with Kolkata trash collectors to achieve the authenticity that is visible in the film. “I spent days and evenings with them. Both me and Shardul had actually gone door to door early mornings, blew whistles, picked up trash, dumped them in the cart, sorted them and did all of that the real waste collectors do on a daily basis. I used to wrap myself in a dirty saree, cover my head with a shawl and used to wear a mask to ensure that I don’t get caught by the house owners,” Chakraborty, an instantly recognizable face in Kolkata, told PvNew. “The little mud house that we shot in, was actually done up by me and Shardul. We did the production design part of the interior to get a feeling of our own home. It was a lifetime experience.”
Bhardwaj praises the “unlimited grace” of the trash collectors he worked with and adds, “Something happens as you spend more and more time in a particular environment with a particular set of people. I have not been able to locate what that thing is but I know something does shift inside one’s self. The enormity of the tragedy and cruelty of the neglect that I would encounter at the dump yard basically shook me to the core.”
“The Scavenger of Dreams” is produced by Ghosh’s Miami-based Maya Leela Films alongside Indian outfit CFP films.
Next up for Ghosh is an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s beloved story “Kabuliwala,” starring Mithun Chakraborty, which is due a Christmas release. He then commences “Puraton,” headlined by Sharmila Tagore, Rituparna Sengupta and Indraneil Sengupta.
Watch the trailer here:
