Stories rooted in personal history often feel more intimate. For filmmaker Soumik Sen, creating the Bengali series, Jazz City, began with family memories of migration, passed down by his mother about her parents’ journey to India.
“My grandparents left almost everything when they came to Kolkata. This is not a unique story. There are so many people who migrated during the Partition, 1947-48. There is one particular scene where a child is picking up empty bullet cartridges after his entire family has been massacred; [it was] something that a musician on the show told me,” recalls Sen.
Soumik Sen
He also turned to Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, which documents the atrocities of Operation Searchlight (March 1971). “There are extremely sordid and gory details [during] Operation Searchlight, which is largely underreported and has gone unpunished,” he adds.
When shaping fiction from history, Sen insists on precision. “To map the true stories first, you have to map the correct cultural incidents. And then you create characters into the story. If you notice that February 21 in 1970 is a Saturday. So you have to keep those things in mind and be accurate.” He also acknowledges that truth is often a version of someone’s perspective. “We will never know the complete truth about any incident, it is always [somebody’s version] of truth. So, you set the parameters given the information and perspective, which is what I have tried. I have told the story from the point of view of a man, Jimmy Roy [played by Arifin Shuvoo], who doesn’t know anything.” For authenticity, Sen cast a Bangladeshi actor in the lead. “We did think of [casting] a prominent face, but I also needed somebody who’s Bangla, and speaks English and Hindi equally well, and has a swag.”
Music shapes the series’ texture, with about 25 tracks composed by Sen, Diptarka Bose, and Arka Mukherjee. “The songs are an album in themselves. In a jazz club, when people are talking, there’s always someone singing in the background, which may or may not take the story forward. Most of the time it is an ambient sound. So that’s how jazz is. Of course, there are some songs to put you in that zone and the mood.”
25
Number of songs in ‘Jazz City’
Did you know?
Despite being a major star in Bangladesh, Arifin Shuvoo’s audition process reportedly lasted nearly two years
