Director Tauquir Ahmed’s film Halda virtually swept the awards given away at the Eighth SAARC Film Festival which concluded in Sri Lanka’s Colombo on Sunday.
The film bagged not only the Best Feature Film Award, but also those for Best Original Score, Best Editor and Best Cinematographer.
At the last festival in 2017, Tauquir’s film Oggattonama had won the Best Screenplay award.
While Oggattonama was about the pathetic situation of Bangladeshi migrant workers centered round the return of an unidentified body from a Middle Eastern country, Halda is about the woes of fishermen whose catch keeps dwindling as the river gets polluted by factories and other wastes from the land.
Tauquir’s script and direction had created a gripping movie which won a well-deserved applause at the end of the show.
Answering questions from the audience, Tauquir said that initially the film was to be only about fishes and fishermen but he soon realized that nobody would want to see a film only on fishes and fishermen and decided to weave the woes of fisherwomen into the story.
The other award winners from the Halda team were: Cinematographer Enamul Sohel, Editor Amit Debnath, Music composers: Tauquir Ahmed, Pinto Ghosh, and Sanzida Mahmood Nandita.
Tauquir Ahmed collected the awards on his colleagues’ behalf.
Twenty six films were shown at the festival from May 22 to 26. There were no entries from Afghanistan and Nepal this year for want of English subtitles, a SAARC Cultural Center official said.
Source: NewsIn Asia