Our Boys
Amader Chelera
BANGLADESH / 2000 / Bengali / Color / Video / 42 min
Director, Script: Manzare Hassin
Photography: Maksudul Bari
Editing: Moynul Huda
Music: Rejwan Ali
Productions: Save The Children (UK), UNICEF (Regional Office for South Asia)
Production Company, Source: Pramannokar
3Fl., 83 Laboratory Road, Dhanmondi
Dhaka-1205 BANGLADESH
Phone: 880-2-8614128/8119011
E-mail: ruchira@bangla.net
Winds of change are sweeping through Bangladesh... The West is irresistible and the East refuses to disappear. In these confusing times, boys from a pop group and a young artist—all from newly emerging upper and middle class families of Dhaka—open their lives to the director. Duties and obligations, women and desire, confusion and contradictions... The boys can feel the wind but do they really know which way it blows?
[Director’s Statement] My film Our Boys is part of a series of four films titled “Let’s Talk Men” focused on the issue of masculinity in South Asia. In 1999 a unique project was launched by Save The Children(UK)’s South and Central Asia office and UNICEF’s Regional Office for South Asia. Four filmmakers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and India were invited to participate in a number of workshops to discuss masculinity and its manifestations as experienced by the filmmakers themselves and also its relationship to violence against women and particularly against girl children. Later on, the filmmakers were given the opportunity to express their understanding of these issues in South Asia in their respective films. These films aim at stimulating discussion about the art of being a man in today’s South Asia. They examine the experience of men and explore the alternatives to age-old patterns of violence and discrimination especially against women and girls.
Manzare Hassin
Born in 1954 in Bangladesh. Graduated from the University of Dhaka in 1977. Trained in the Documentary Department of FAMU in Prague (1986-88). Has worked as a freelance audio-visual practitioner in Dhaka since 1990. Works include One Day in Krishnanagar (1993), A Chronicle of Beel Dhakatia (1995), Rokeya (1996), Art & Liberation in War (1997) and The Fighter (2001). |