The Flute (Banshi)

This film is about the dream and imagination of a would-be filmmaker. The story depicts how he, with his innocent look, views the rural Bangladesh society and how that innocence gets shattered. This protagonist, Arif, a young man with dreams of making films, goes to a village far from the capital city Dhaka to visit a fair. A fellow passenger, Shaila whom he didn’t know teams up with him. The two of them are impressed by the rural scenes and are excited by the prospect of enjoying rural culture. But at one stage, they find in fear that two influential families of the village can even pick up a fight over a trivial matter. A stir is seated in the village which embarrasses, the urban visitors, Arif and Shaila. Things do not go well with Arif’s dream. He rather finds resemblance of the incident with the incident and the stories told by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Joliet four hundred years ago and by Tolstoy a hundred and fifty four years ago in his “Little girls are wiser than men” The resemblance surprises and frustrates Arif. But he also finds a way out in a dream incident. His fantasy and reality come together. He too becomes a character in the imaginary sequence that ends the film. Is it a ‘film within film’? Why don’t the real people act like this? The film ends with both hope and despair. It leaves questions but keeps the answers open-ended.