Meera and Muzaffar Ali at ITC Sonar Bangla on Tuesday; (top) a model showacases a creation by the duo at Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week 2006. Picture above by Pabitra Das

He has gifted Indian cinema one of its all-time classics, and artist-filmmaker-fashion designer Muzaffar Ali is all set to repeat his act. In Calcutta with wife Meera on Tuesday to attend an interactive session hosted by the Ladies Study Group, Muzaffar shared his plans of making a movie of “epic proportions”.

The man who explored the “feminine feudal structure of Awadh” in his legendary film Umrao Jaan, is now working on Rumi, based on the life of the 13th-century Sufi poet by that name. “Rumi is about a small but very difficult journey, from the mind to the heart. I want to present it through the greatest screenplay of the world,” smiled Muzaffar.

And he wants the “global message” to be presented by “global players”.

“If I could convince Al Pacino or Johnny Depp to play Rumi, that would be my dream cast. Indian actors are so trapped in the loud and mundane expressions of Bollywood that I’m not sure they can carry the message of this film,” he felt.

Muzaffar has been penning the script of Rumi for the past four years and foresees the film to be ready in another couple of years.

For now, the “poetry-driven” filmmaker is working on a television serial for Doordarshan titled Ghazalnama, which explores the lives of 13 Urdu poets. “Each poet opens up a whole new world and we see it through his eyes,” explains the man for whom “shayari is the petrol” that drives him.

If the filmmaker has his hands full for the moment, so does the designer. For, Meera and Muzaffar are among the six designers chosen to represent India at the Arts de la Mode et de la Photographie, the international fashion and photography festival at the Villa Noailles in France from April 28 to 30. This takes the designers a step closer to showcasing at the Paris Fashion Week.

“Our aim always is to go global and this is a very good opportunity. We have sent our audio-visuals for Paris Fashion Week and will love to showcase there if chosen,” said Meera.

But designing for Meera and Muzaffar is not all about going global. After all, their label Kotwara, credited with catapulting the Lucknow chikan to fashion street, was born to offer employment to the “helpless” women of Muzaffar’s native village Kotwara way back in 1990.

“We had discovered magic in the hands of the local rural women. Today, we have 600 women working for us and we are offering them dwar pe rozi (employment at home),” she added. The couple also runs a school for the children of Kotwara, which imparts vocational training and humanist education.

Starting his career in Calcutta as an advertising professional and moving on to become an artist, a filmmaker and a designer, Muzaffar’s new love is Sufism. But his strongest passion still remains filmmaking. “Film is a very powerful medium to reach out to people and touch their lives. But we have to keep on reinventing cinema over and over again. In India, cinema is trapped by market forces and individualism. We need to liberate it.”

And in his strong criticism of Bollywood, Muzaffar doesn’t spare son Shaad Ali, who gave Bollywood one of its biggest hits of 2005, Bunty Aur Babli. “Shaad was born on the editing table and brought up in the dubbing studio. From his childhood, the camera has been his life. So he knows what I had to suffer as a filmmaker because of the clash of Bollywood with my personal sensibilities. And he of course knows that if he follows his father’s way he won’t survive,” shared the father.

But he added: “I feel very happy with his career and I hope some day we are able to work on a project together. But I will never be swallowed by the Bollywood agenda.”