Active in theatres since his college days, it was natural for filmmaker Soumyajit Majumdar to pay homage to it in his debut film Homecoming. Set in Kolkata, Homecoming is a film about a group of friends who had formed a short-lived yet popular youth theatre group Amra. They reunite on a fateful Durga Puja night, seven years since then at their rehearsal space, a bungalow that’s about to be converted into a heritage hotel by the Ganges. The lucid slice of life story moves back and forth dissecting their interpersonal relationships and has a stellar cast of young talents like Sayani Gupta, Tushar Pandey, Plabita Borthakur, Soham Majumder, Hussain Dalal, Tuhina Das among others.
“I was attached to the theatre from my college days and formed Lok Arts Collective in 2010 with 20-30 other like-minded friends. We reclaimed unorthodox spaces for theatre apart from the traditional proscenium,” tells Soumyajit, whose first play Kalakar Ki Kahani created noises in the Delhi theatre circuit for its treatment.
A self-proclaimed global gypsy, Majumdar got initiated to the world of cinema and developed a knack for storytelling when his mother took him for Rituparni Ghosh’s films. “My relatives discouraged my mother from taking me to watch such mature films, but it was those very films that exposed me to the craft of nuanced storytelling,” recalls Majumdar, whose film was selected for NFDC Lab, South Asia's largest film market collection.
Indeed, Homecoming is a slowburn drama and the audiences are just loving the way he has let it unfold on screen. It’s a fun yet complex film and as a first-time director, Soumyajit just went with the flow and took the risk of writing the rest of the script after finishing the first schedule of the shoot. “I identified the strength of each character and played along with that so that the loopholes in the scripts were minimal. There is a lot of theatre elements in the film and we have tried to express theatre as a medium of dissent and communication,” explains the young maker, who undertook guerilla shoots to capture real and raw moments out of life.
Being a line producer and an actor for a while, surely helped Soumyojit to learn the ropes of trade but being the writer, director and producer of his first film had its fair share of challenges and pressure than one can imagine. “It was a huge challenge for me and I had to succeed since I felt responsible for 100 more people, who were dreaming my dream. The biggest challenge was arranging funds since many producers turned down the film even before reading the full script, It was then that I decided to produce it myself,” he tells.
But the biggest reward for Soumyajit was when his film was taken over by Sony LIV. “I approached all the OTT platforms and all of them responded positively. I feel the OTTs are emerging stronger by the day as a medium to display great content. I guess theatres will mainly be for larger than life cinema or high concept films like Andhadhun. But OTTs are for intimate experiences.
The filmmaker is now busy writing a prequel and a sequel to the film. He is also writing an original web series and just finished scripting a Hindi film. “The series is a slice of life of the 90s kids and shows how they grow up and embrace and adapt to global culture. The film is a racy thriller about how heroes from Tollywood who star in remake films get murdered film remake heroes in Tollywood are getting murdered,” tells the director, who wishes to work with Sanya Malhotra in future.
Homecoming is streaming on SonyLIV