Awards and festivals

Film description

Sazzad came to Dhaka as a young, energetic man with lots of ideas for his future. Today he is deep in debt, his relationship is on the brink of collapsing, and the hope for a better life is long lost among the streets of the city he travels through seeking a way out. The thought of emigration is his only focal point, but even that seems to be too costly.

Desperation overflows the black-and-white, grainy frames showing the capital city of Bangladesh in an utterly gloomy light. Saad is not turning away from the reality which takes away the last bits of the protagonist’s faith in a change of fate. The streets of the city he wanted to find his place in, create a suffocating labyrinth with no escape, encircling and dangerous. There is little hope for a helping hand – everyone is sunken deep in their own troubles. The individual struggle of Sazzad is a wider image of the tragic fate of thousands of people who decide to wander through the contemporary world, giving up everything close and familiar, hoping for very little – a normal life. The debut of an independent filmmaker from Bangladesh is exhausting, but also brutally honest, not looking for any delusions or false comfort.

Jagoda Murczyńska