Protagonist Tania Ahmed and child actress Dhriti in a scene from the film.

fRashed Chowdhury, who has been involved with the short film alternative movement since 1988, had the premiere of his film "Biswmaraner Nadi" at the Goethe Institut recently. He has been learning under different visiting film makers from overseas. The script for the film was begun five years ago and is based on his own sense of alienation. The central character is a young woman who has decided to commit suicide. The child in the film is there to bring in the woman's own childhood memories. The woman is shown as arriving at a flat with a man and spending her time with a child. She has a room that is stored with items that originate in her childhood and contains paraphernalia that date back to her parents' days.

The protagonist is seen looking through a well of mirrored water when she finds herself alone and alienated from everything. She recalls her father and during the middle of the night she wakes up and asks her mother, "Ma, Papa is not home yet!" She moves around the corners of her old, pale, mossy house. In the absence of her father, she finds company in his library with the pen, inkpot and painting books. On one idle afternoon she discovers her mother talking very closely to a stranger in her bedroom. She becomes afraid of loosing her shelter. Her cry mixes with some fallen coloured balls of wool.

Through the path that the woolen balls move, her seven-year-old child follows and feels afraid in entering her dream room, where the woman has preserved her childhood memories. The music box suddenly begins playing and she cannot prevent herself from listening to it. She tries to find a path that would help her to stay out of trouble. She throws the music box into the water but cannot save herself from its torturing, haunting sounds. She prepares her daughter to play at dawn and enters into the dream world. We have then fallen back to her childhood from when had begun her identity crisis. From this arises the conflict between her real existence and her dream life.

"I myself have felt the suicidal tendency and I believe it is there in our collective unconsciousness. Some of us cannot bear this pressure. The film is linked up with the Greek mythological River Lethe that makes you forget the past. There is a lot to do in film making like shooting and editing. I wanted to experience all that went into film making by experiencing all that goes into the making of a film. Earlier I had made a 48 minutes documentary film on the self-exiled pioneer sculptor Novera Ahmed," said Rashed Chowdhury. "This is a part of my development as a film maker, and is just a step towards my goal. This is a film in 16 mm of 36 minutes, which is different from a video production of my earlier effort."

Talking about the problems that he faced while making the film, Chowdhury said, "We had to bring the raw film stock from India. It had to be processed in India, edited it here and then cut the negative in India again. All this took two and a half years to complete. I would have liked some assistance from the government or some organisation but this was not to be. The film cost over five lakh takas and I had to borrow this amount."

Chowdhury used two child actresses, Dhriti and Lameesa Rimjhim. The central character was done by Tania Ahmed, while the other characters were played by Rokeya Prachi, Shirin Bakul, Shamsul Alam Bokul, Shoeb Islam, Rupa, Nazma and Chan Mian. Chowdhury purposefully chose faces that were not so well known on the screen.

The film had L Apu Rozario as the cinematographer, Ratan Paul did the editing and sound, Rahul Anondo and Pulak Gupta provided the music. Meanwhile the still photography was done by A K M Zakaria, and Abdus Sattar Ripon did the sound recording.