Writer-director Soumyajit Majumdar’s #Homecoming is slated to be the opening film at the Gange Sur Seine Film Festival in Paris to be held between October 5 and October 8 at the iconic Le Lincoln Cinemas followed by Toulouse at Le Cratere on October 27 as part of the same film festival. The jury includes French cinema legends Sophie Dulac, Nello Banfi and Emmanuel Pierrat.
The film is also the official selection at META Filmfest (Nov 8-12) which is the only International Film Festival in Dubai, apart from winning a lot of national and international awards. Besides, a London-based production and distribution company Moringa Entertainment owned by Munsur Ali, (Chairman, London City Corporation Culture, Heritage and Libraries Committees) is presenting special screenings of the film in the UK during October-November as part of the broader tie-up of Moringa and LOK for facilitating Indo-UK cultural collaborations.
#Homecoming is about a group of "friends" and "misfits", who had formed a popular yet short-lived youth theatre group, reunite for the first time after seven years on an eventful Durga Puja (One of the largest Art and Culture festivals, recognised by UNESCO in its Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list) night at their old rehearsal space, a bungalow which is about to be converted into Kolkata's first five-star heritage hotel by the Ganges. This cosmopolitan, multi-lingual film (English/Bengali/Hindi) is a musical love letter to Calcutta. Comprising the best of young talents in the huge ensemble cast from Bollywood and Tollywood including Sayani Gupta, Tushar Pandey, Soham Majumdar, Hussain Dalal, and Plabita Borthakur besides an eclectic multi-genre music album and a national-international award-winning crew, the film deals with urban youth issues and lives of young independent artists in Kolkata.
“Even after one and a half years from its release as a direct-to-digital on SonyLIV, #Homecoming still continues to break conventions. I am glad to embark on the last leg of the film festival round and international screening tour of #Homecoming across the UK, France and Dubai. The door to world cinema had opened up for me after watching French new wave cinema of greats like Truffaut, Godard, Agnes Varda and Eric Rohmer. The French New Wave is instrumental in shaping my artistic aesthetics. Screening my debut feature film as a writer-director-producer in Paris at an iconic cinema with French subtitles as the opening film of a film festival will be a memory of a lifetime. I would be back in December to start pre-production of my next film,” says Majumdar.
Chayan Sarkar, founder and artistic director of the festival Gange Sur Seine, says, “#Homecoming succeeds in weaving and delivering a profound message beautifully. It reinforces the constant inner urge of an individual living far away to reconnect to their cultural, artistic and linguistic heritage. The film depicts the deep theatrical passion and intellectual dimension of Kolkata artists, particularly a tradition that's finding it hard to survive. This has high emotions, drama, social challenges and dilemmas, beautiful music and interesting characters that paint a modern Kolkata which is going through a transition of cultural values and renewed identity. You will never feel that it is the filmmaker's debut feature. Soumyajit's style and script at times made me think of Italian films like Settembre by Giulia Steigerwalt. #Homecoming is a fresh approach.”
The unique style of this film will intrigue the French audience. French cinephiles have always been appreciative of good Bengali cinema from the days of Satyajit Ray or Mrinal Sen. #Homecoming demonstrates that West Bengal remains the centre of 'Nouvelle Vague' experiments when it comes to innovative ways of telling and structuring complex socio-cultural layers of Indian stories.