New Currents Winner Iqbal H. Chowdhury Returns to Busan With ‘Dhakar Nagin’ Project
variety.comNaman Ramachandran Bangladeshi-Canadian filmmaker Iqbal H. Chowdhury, joint winner of the New Currents competition at the 2023 Busan International Film Festival for “The Wrestler,” has his next film at the festival’s Asian Project Market (APM).
Set in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka in the early 2000s, the film will follow a film journalist searching for a controversial B-movie star in the chaos of a push to ban vulgar movies. “The idea for ‘Dhakar Nagin’ came from one of my essay presentations at York University in Toronto.
My MA thesis focused on popular Bangladeshi cinema, and I wrote an essay analyzing the various dance moves of Bangladeshi film stars as a part of my course curriculum.
Watching Bangla films in the cinema has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. Nagin [snake] musicals, fight scenes, dance numbers, and melodrama created an exciting experience for audiences in Bangladeshi cinema halls.
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