Blockbuster Bengali flick Sathi director now tries the same magic in new milieu

“The times have changed since the Sathi days, when my film was released in over 50 theatres and had three screenings for multiple weeks and the college audiences, which had stopped flocking to cinema halls to see Bengali entertainers, came back as words spread about the film’s love-family drama-action-romance-suspense quotient,” Haranath tells IBNS at the trailer launch of the film Amar Prem.

“Now with closure of many single screens in past 12-13 years and the halls showing different films during different shows, films don’t last at all theatres for weeks any more. Also keeping the tech savvy generation in mind, Amar Prem is a differently packaged film,” Haranath, known for his clean, family entertainers in masala genre, explains.

The film, having a heady mix of different contents like rebirth, triangular love can also be called a disaster movie as a devastating earthquake having ripped apart lives of the principal characters forms the background of later developments.

“To recreate the earthquake scene we have used stock scenes of the Nepal quake as well as graphics and it will look like real life on the screen. The quake serves as the crisis point in the lives of the characters, whose different worlds come crushing down in the disaster,” Haranath says.

Besides popular young actor Gourab Chakraborty, a bunch of young faces, including a well-known model, have been cast in the film.

“I had always launched new faces many of whom later went on to become big names,” Haranath, whose last two films were Chhayamoy (based on a Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay novel) and Chalo Paltai (on modern education system and the rat race faced by children), says.

Besides Kolkata, the film had been shot in Kurseong, Mirik, Kalimpong of the Hills and a popular tourist spot dam area in south Bengal,

Image: Facebook page of the director