Bangladeshi filmmaker Maksud Hossain’s debut feature film Saba is an emotional deep dive into an atypical mother-daughter relationship, which is factious and compassionate in equal measure. It is also a poignant exploration of the essential reciprocity and trust underlying a patient-caregiver bond.
Young Saba (Mehazabien Chowdhury) is the nurse, guardian and provider for her ailing, bedridden mother Shirin (Rokeya Prachy). Both might have contrasting perspectives and approaches to life but are allied in being frustrated with perennial privation. Often annoyed, exasperated, and angry, they are also united in the affection, care and concern for each other.
Hossain is non-judgemental and empathetic in framing his characters as creatures of their limiting circumstances and interminable struggles, but who still dare to dream of changing their fate while enjoying little joys of life like a plate of Kachchi (Biriyani), a walk in the park, a sly shot of prohibited liquor, and the popular evergreen film songs. There is also a larger moral arc of betrayal, guilt, forgiveness, and deliverance that is subtly implicit in the film, as is the evocation of the economic tenuousness plaguing Bangladesh. Hossain also brings alive the sights and sounds of Dhaka vividly, showcasing the city in ways not seen before.
The human drama rides on memorable performances, especially Chowdhury in the titular role. She is luminous and powerful in her petite presence as a young girl who has kept her life on hold for her tough, demanding mother but hasn’t given up on her own dreams, desires, and ambitions. Things might be grim but not entirely hopeless.
A universal, relatable tale of the parent-child bond, Saba has an India connection. It was one of the South Asian projects featured in the Co-Production Market in the National Film Development Corporation’s Film Bazaar in 2021, and Leena Khobragade, formerly with the NFDC, is one of its co-producers. Also, the sound designer, Neeraj Gera, is from Mumbai.
Hossain was born and brought up in Abu Dhabi, studied in the USA, and made hundreds of commercials before moving to Bangladesh for making feature films. In an exclusive interview with The New Indian Express, the filmmaker dwells on the making of Saba, the complex mother-daughter relationship at its core, capturing the sights and sounds of Dhaka, and his wonderful cast and crew.
Excerpts:
You have dedicated the film to two ladies. Is it inspired by a real-life story?
My wife, Trilora Khan, who is also the co-writer, and her mother were in a near-fatal car accident almost 25 years ago. Since then, my mother-in-law had been a paraplegic, and she depended on my wife and her father for everything. After the death of my father-in-law, I saw Trilora struggling to take care of her, even though she had help, money, resources, family. It’s then that we started thinking together about telling the story of a young woman, Saba, who lives in lower middle-class Bangladesh and must take care of her paraplegic mother without having any help around. What would Saba do in a situation like this to keep her mother alive at any cost? Though the inspiration is from a real story, the characters are completely fictional, their socio-economic background, the family dynamics. [Unlike Saba’s missing father] Trilora’s father was very much around. So, I have dedicated the film to my wife and her mother.
We were shooting the film in sequence, in the way the script was written. As the film progresses, the mother's health deteriorates. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law was following that same arc. Towards the beginning of the film [shoot], she was admitted to the hospital. Then she kept getting worse. As we were progressing with the film, she was moved to the ICU. She passed away four or five hours after we wrapped up the shoot. It was emotional turmoil for us and the cast and crew members. I wanted to celebrate her life, how a person survived in a wheelchair, depending on other people for more than 25 years. I wanted to show what the caregiver goes through because it's such a unique dynamic.
The film is about people stuck in certain situations and how they respond to them…
As a filmmaker my goal is to make films that are an emotional experience. The audience for them might be very small but they should have an emotional experience. I'm more interested in the characters than the plot. I am very interested in culture, in the country, in politics. I don't make an outright political statement, but you can feel it. I'm interested in the emotional truth. That's what keeps me up at night. That's what gets me going. Even as a film buff, I am not so interested in movies that are plot-driven. There's only so much you can do with the plot. But every character is different, their dynamic is different. I like that organic thing.
The subcontinental cinema largely idealises the mother figure and the parent-child relationship. But you have shown a complex bond…
That’s how I love to direct. I want to create a situation where the characters come and give me something that I hadn’t thought of even when I was writing [them]. I feel that human relationships are very complex—parental relationships, romantic relations, what have you. I also love to tell stories from a female perspective. Trilora helps me with that part—is it feeling authentic? Would a woman do that? The mother-daughter dynamic is inspired by Trilora and her mother. Like the arguments about food that we all have with our elderly parents. But the short moment of violence just came out of my imagination, not reality. If you ask me where it came from, I don't know.
But the perspective of your film is that of the daughter Saba…
It was by design from the point of view of Saba. She is in every scene. Wherever the camera is, Saba is there. The camera can't go anywhere where Saba is not [present]. Those were my rules. That's what I was interested in, because I felt that I knew Trilora’s story from a kind of bias, from her perspective. I wanted to give that feeling to the audience as well. Also, to highlight that more, I decided to shoot the entire film with a single lens, only a 50-millimetre lens, so that there is no shift in perspective.
There is a moral dimension to the story as well, in her growing interest in the office colleague Ankur and the betrayal...
I am very interested in moral dilemmas where you don't know which choice is the right one or the better one, because there is none. And that's the case in life when it comes to crucial decisions. I knew a friend whose father was dying from cancer. She knew that his end was near and didn't want to be next to him [at that moment]. So, she went out of the house, circling it for 15 minutes waiting for him to die. But when she came back her father was still alive and passed away in her arms. I remembered that. I was thinking, would I do the same if I was in a similar situation? Was what she did morally right? These kinds of conflicts interest me. So, Saba wants to keep her mother going. What then can she do? What’s the way out to get the money? That’s very fascinating to me, what all people must do [in life]. My father comes from a very humble background, growing up in one of the poorest villages in Bangladesh. I've heard stories of my grandfather, my father, my uncles, the moral questions they had to face that we were fortunate enough not to go through.
Tell us about the journey of the film…
I travelled with the script to various labs and markets. The first one was NFDC Film Bazaar in India in 2021. It was an online edition just after Covid. We then went to the Cannes Film Festival’s Co-production Day. We went to Asian Project Market in Busan, Film Independent’s Global Media Makers Los Angeles residency.
Do you like to take scripts through labs?
It really helped me but it's very time-consuming, and it takes a lot of energy, because you have to keep going, keep at it. The first draft was written in January 2021, so it took over two years and we finally started shooting last year.
You make great use of the city spaces and the sound—the traffic, azaan, old film songs…
I worked with Neeraj Gera, who is a very talented sound designer from Mumbai. I was very lucky to have worked with him. I worked with a lot of people from Mumbai in the post-production. They were very gracious with their time. I wanted the sound to represent Dhaka. I recorded hours and hours of sounds of Bangladesh. Like the hawkers are very different from those in Kolkata. Then there’s the azaan in Dhaka, also called the city of mosques. The film songs were inspired by my mother-in-law who used to watch movies, the old black and white Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen films. But we didn't have the copyrights for their songs. So I worked with someone from Pune to compose original songs in the same vein.
I wanted to mark the locations with the soundscape. So, in the mother's place you hear these songs. You hear the Kolkata soaps that are very popular in Bangladesh. Every house has them playing at night.
The sheesha lounge, where Saba works, has hip hop, house music. I own a sheesha lounge myself in Dhaka so I'm very familiar with their soundscape.
As far as the locations are concerned, I wanted to show the Dhaka that I knew. Like the cops on the flyover scene—something similar had happened to me.
I wanted the audience to feel claustrophobic for Saba, because she's stuck. She has to let go to be free. The only time you feel a sense of freedom and the frame gets bigger, is when they go on the outing to the park.
Which brings me to the fantastic performance from Mehazabien Chowdhury as Saba and all the other actors as well...
Nothing makes me happier than when I hear that people loved my actors. We went through a long, arduous audition process for the role of Saba where I met almost everyone in Bangladesh, all the actresses, the leading ones and also some new ones from theatre who may not have done a lot of work but are good. But no one was feeling like Saba. It was Trilora who recommended Mehazabien. She is one of the biggest TV stars in Bangladesh. She has been working in television for the last 14 years. She has over 5 million followers in Bangladesh. I've worked with her on commercials before which was more in the realm of glamour. She had been waiting to do her first feature film. She wanted it to be special. She was instantly interested in Saba. I gave her the script, and she got back to me in two days. She agreed to the six months of rehearsals with the entire cast. And after that I cast the others depending on how they would fit with her. It has been an absolutely wonderful experience working with them.