Rubaiyat Hossain is based in Dhaka. She is the director of three feature films, Meherjaan (2011), Under Construction (2015) and Made in Bangladesh (2019). Together with her husband Ashique Mostafa, Rubaiyat founded the production company Khona Talkies (http://www.khonatalkies.com/), called after the 12th century Bengali poetess and astrologer.
This interview took place in London in the summer of 2018. It was conducted by Valentina Vitali, and transcribed and edited by Shaun Alexander.
Valentina Vitali: Tell me about your background.
Rubaiyat Hossain: I have a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies and a master’s degree in South Asian studies with a focus on religion. I was going to be an academic. That was my goal and I was interested in gender. I worked with women’s rights organisations in Bangladesh and as an intern with NGOs during my holidays, and really that was where I wanted to be. By the time I finished my undergraduate studies I felt that I wanted to know more about the region that I’m from. When you study gender studies in a North American institution you learn all about American feminism, which is great, but I wanted my perspective to be more specific to my region. So, I did an MA in South Asian studies. The idea was also to a do a PhD, but I always wanted to make films. I grew up reading children’s books by Satyajit Ray. Later I realised that he was also a filmmaker and read his book on cinema. He talked about the French New Wave, Neorealism etc. This allowed me to begin to see film as a craft. So I enrolled at the New York Film Academy to do a film diploma. We shot short films with 16mm cameras and learned how to edit. I obtained my diploma in the summer of 2002. As a graduation present I asked my parents to buy me a PD150 camera and started making short films. I sent them to festivals in Las Vegas, New York and Dhaka. Eventually, in 2008, I was able to make my first feature film. I also met my partner, in 2007, who had studied film direction and production at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He was in Dhaka and looking for someone to work with, to produce. I was also looking for someone to work with. We made our first feature and set up our own company. You know how in South Asia parents set aside big sums of money for their children’s weddings. We got married in London, in a bookstore, for £200 and used the wedding money to make our film together.
VV: You told me that you were a feminist since early on. Did your family background help in this sense?
RH: My great grandmother wrote books looking at Islam and religion from a feminist angle. On the one hand there is an element in my family of strong women, but on the other hand, my family were still quite restrictive about what a woman can or cannot do. I always felt there was something wrong with the way I was treated as a woman, or the way people looked at me in the street, or even the way my mum dealt with me when I had my period. That’s when I went to the United States. I went to my first women’s studies course. That’s when suddenly everything became clear. Now I know. Then, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. This is what I want to talk about with my films.
VV: You worked with NGOs. How important was that?
RH: In Bangladesh NGOs played a very big role in women’s rights. They are also involved in law and education programmes teaching women about their rights. People in NGOs became my mentors. Some of them have passed away now, but it was really helpful to have these women as my role models. They took me under their wings and gave me jobs. For instance, I was able to work in women shelters. In Bangladesh we have this thing called Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). People in a village get together and make important decisions. I used to take part in those meetings and help educate women about the law. There were cases of violence against women. I was involved in ADR between the ages of 18 and 22. I also came to know women who were sex workers. They became part of my life and we are still in touch. I worked for BRAC University teaching courses like Bangladesh Studies and Gender and Development. I was one of the co-coordinator of the first sexuality and rights conference, back in 2007. It was a very meaningful moment for the LGBT community in Bangladesh.
VV: Let’s talk about your films. You have made three short fims. What are they about?
RH: Two of them, Balikar Gollachut and Shimanto, are visualisations of poetry. The other, Priyo Ami, is about a woman who decides to have an abortion. I made them in 2005–2006.
VV: Then you made Meherjaan, which caused you problems in Bangladesh. It is about a woman who, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, has an affair with a Pakistani soldier. The return of her niece triggers all sorts of memories and recollections. Tell me more about it.
RH: The representation of women during the War of Independence (1971) was the subject of my MA thesis and I read a lot on the subject at the time. I finally found a story about a soldier who didn’t want to fight and had saved a woman. They had a love affair. It seemed like a story of hope to me. After 9/11 nationalism really began to show its ugly side. I wanted to make a film which would not be about violence but about healing. Meherjaan is a film about individuals who don’t want to fight. In Bangladesh they took it as an anti-1971 film. I made an anti-war film and I did, as I still do now, speak strongly against this masculine brand of nationalism. That doesn’t mean I am not patriotic. Nationalism reduces the woman and her body to the body of the land, the country, and enforces notions of purity on it. It’s rubbish. With that film I was misunderstood. People claimed that I was disrespectful of 1971, that I was betraying my nation. It was very traumatic because it was the first feature film I made.
VV: Did you anticipate that kind of reaction?
RH: I didn’t expect the reaction to be as negative. In my mind I had not said anything offensive. The soldier does not want to fight and the girl is also tormented. Her cousin is raped by Pakistani soldiers. People in her family are killed. I tried to tell a story that was neutral, but people took one element of the story and inflated it. They just saw a beautiful woman falling in love with a Pakistani soldier and ignored the other layers of the story, the fact that the niece who comes back is a war child. She was born out of rape. Or the women coming together, recounting their history. All of this was ignored or misunderstood.
VV: What was the response in closed screenings?
RH: Those were very good. The film provoked discussion about nationalism, women’s bodies and history, and that’s what it was meant to do.
VV: Under Construction, your second feature, tells the story of an urban middle class woman who is unwilling to fit into the pre-prepared future laid out for her. She plays the role of Nandini in Tagore’s Raktakarabi.
RH: Under Construction is about contemporary women’s identity in Bangladesh, upper middle class women’s identity. Roya, the protagonist (played by Shahana Goswami) is progressive, a theatre actor, and her husband is an architect. They live in a very nice flat in Dhaka. Roya seems independent but she too has her shackles, which are invisible. Her husband puts her down, her mother criticises what she is wearing, both insist she should have a baby. All these pressures, dictated by her gender, she is unable or unwilling to meet. She is a free spirit, but not a happy one and is really struggling to get out. My new film, Made in Bangladesh, came out of Under Construction. There is a character in Under Construction, Moyna, the young house-maid, who eventually leaves the household to work in a garment factory. When I showed Under Construction in Saõ Paolo many women in the audience asked what was going to happen to this girl. I decided then that this was going to be my next film. With Made in Bangaldesh I was also interested in telling a story about a working class woman. Factory workers are a huge part of Bangladesh’s economy.
VV: You told me that as a woman on set, directing and producing, sometimes people can’t even look you in the eyes.
RH: It is slowly changing. Film is a gender-bending space. When you are on the set and you are doing your job, the crew does not care if you are a man or a woman. All they care about is the job at hand. Within cinema there is a space for transgression. Take filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh; the kind of gender-bending he performed on the set, in as conservative a place as Calcutta, would not be possible in any other profession. People accepted him, he became a persona. Or, within American cinema, the 1940s director Dorothy Arzner. She was amazing. For me it’s about reinventing how women’s stories can be told. The default position, even today, is that when a woman appears in cinema she has to be a pleasing object. Even at film festivals some women are presented as if they were some sort of jewel in the crown. I refuse to present myself or my actors in that way, as visually pleasing rather than as complex individuals. But it’s a challenge to do that in cinema, because we are so trained to go with the grain.
VV: Let’s return to Made in Bangladesh. You decided to make it because people asked about the maid in Under Construction.
RH: When I am finishing one film I am already thinking about the next one, so those questions about Moyna really caught my attention. I started to meet factory workers and then met this extraordinary woman. She is so strong, spontaneous and only 23 years old. I fell in love with her strength. So I loosely based the film on her life. She was part of the crew helping to teach the actresses to work on the sewing machines, and helping with the dialogue. She is a factory worker and president of the union. If the film travels to festivals I want her to travel with it too, because I think her voice is important. She can speak for herself. That level of empowerment is impressive; she studied only up to 5th grade, started working in the factory at the age of 13 and by 23 has become the union president. There is so much she wants to do and so much she can do.
VV: Tell me a little about Khona Talkies.
RH: When Ashique and I started making films we found there were a lot of people around us who were very hungry to make films. But there was a lack of infrastructure and support. Not necessarily financial. Support like how to write an application for funding or helping each other to write scripts. We attempted to set up a filmmaker collective, working together with other producers and directors, trying to work in each other’s films. We are also trying to get private funding to produce short films and look for international distribution. We were able to get films distributed in libraries and embassies, showing them in cultural centres throughout the world and to tap into online distribution and resources. Made in Bangladesh was a European coproduction, with most of the financing coming from countries like France, Denmark and Norway. That’s why we do most of the post-production there. In France, the film has been picked up by Pyramid Distribution, who are also world sales agents. With the Khona Talkies project Sand City, the first feature film by the director Mahde Hasan, we are trying to go down the same path, finding a European coproducer and raising funding globally. In Bangladesh, the market for the kind of films we make is small, as is distribution and financial support.
VV: Are festivals important?
RH: Festivals are important to meet filmmakers from other parts of the world, to network with film professionals like distributors and sales agents. Financially speaking, festivals will sometimes give you screening fees and that’s a way for filmmakers to get a little bit of money over time. Under Construction was acquired by the Spanish cultural ministry and they show it at their cultural institutes around the world. In Bangladesh we went to different parts of the country, selling tickets and screening the film ourselves.
