Kolkata boy Soumyajit Majumdar makes his debut as a feature film director with #Homecoming. The ambitious project — described as a “musical love letter to cosmopolitan Kolkata” — focuses on a group of “friends” and “misfits”, who had formed a popular yet short-lived youth theatre group and reunite for the first time after seven years on an eventful Durga Puja night at their old rehearsal space, a bungalow which is about to be converted into Kolkata’s first five-star heritage hotel by the Ganges.
Soumyajit, a prolific theatre and film actor himself, has written and directed #Homecoming that stars names like Sayani Gupta, Hussain Dalal, Tushar Pandey, Soham Majumdar and Plabita Borthakur, besides a host of well-known faces from the city.
The behind-the-scenes team comprises national-level talents such as Bodhaditya Banerjee (editing), Anup Singh (cinematography), Gobinda Mondal (costume design) and Anindit Roy (sound design).
The 10-track music album of the film comprises diverse genres like pop, rock, classical, electronica, rap, folk and indie, and features the likes of Mou Sultana, Rahat Indori, Sameer Rahat and electronica act Hybrid Protokol, among others.
Slated to stream soon on SonyLIV, #Homecoming is all set to become the first feature film from Bengal to be released on the platform. The Telegraph caught up with Soumyajit for an exclusive chat to know more.
You have some 30-odd actors in a 90-minute film?! That’s huge...
Yes, about 27 actors, with individual hashtagged characters as you see in the poster....
What’s was the genesis of #Homecoming?
As an actor, I felt that I was becoming stagnant and was also becoming typecast. After doing meaty roles in festival favourite award-winning films like Cat Sticks and Ghost of the Golden Groves, that artistic satisfaction was somehow missing when I joined the industry here.
It was then that I started writing more. I took a break from acting once a month for three years. I wanted to make a film which is a love letter to Calcutta... stories about the city which are normally not told. #Homecoming is episodic cinema, it’s a triad-structured film with a beginning, middle and end.
In this generation of hashtags, we decided to name the film #Homecoming, with hashtagged characters and hashtagged episode names.
We shot the first schedule in February 2020 and then we shot one year later towards the end of the second Covid-19 wave. We finished the post-production in December and parallely, SonyLIV picked up the project.
This is an NFDC Producer’s Lab project through Film Bazaar, Goa. So there was already a buzz around the film, and we are getting some festival enquiries as well. It’s great that an independent film-maker like me got to make the film on my own terms and also release it on my terms. The intellectual property rights are with me, enabling me to work on the prequels and sequels to the film.
The film touches upon the fact that a large part of the Calcutta urban intelligentsia is actually divorced from the festival of Durga Puja, largely celebrating it in the form of house parties. The film asks why this generation is increasingly getting alienated from Durga Puja. Though they unite against the backdrop of the festivities, the film asks where is the Durga Puja in their lives. This is a very new kind of a film for which we really don’t have any reference points.
Given the names attached to this film, both in front of the camera and behind it, was it ever overwhelming for a first-time film-maker like you?
It was definitely overwhelming to have a dream team put together like this. The crew and a lot of the lead cast are more experienced than me, but I never felt that way because it was the script that binded us. My only proper friend from the cast has been Hussain Dalal, with whom I stayed in Bombay when I went in 2008 for Thespo (a youth theatre movement) with Tin Can.
When I shared the script with the actors in Bombay, there was a great response... much better than the response I got from actors in Kolkata, even though I knew many of them personally and had even worked with some. I have been part of the casting fraternity and have helped (casting director) Mukesh Chhabra and Casting Bay, owned by Abhishek Banerjee and Anmol Ahuja, and my network in that sense was strong, having helped in the casting of Pari, Kahaani and some other films. That experience and network helped me a lot in getting in touch with actors in Bombay, all of whom were excited after reading the script. We have cast promising names from Kolkata. Everyone in my lead cast has done theatre and that’s what binds us.
I never saw it as overwhelming that my film has Mou Sultana making a comeback after so many years.... #Homecoming also has Neil Mukherjee, the founder member of Krosswindz, as part of its music. Curating the film’s music took us two years. (Lyricist and poet) Rahat Indori passed away in 2020 and this is his last project.
The best thing is that making this film elicited a community feeling. Since this is not a studio-backed project, we had no hierarchy. Everyone came up with suggestions.
What made you want to become a film-maker?
I consider myself to be a byproduct of the Calcutta youth arts community and independent art scene. My first tryst with independent art was with the group called The Red Curtain, with whom I worked backstage. I worked with Tin Can as well. I was also drawn to the arts and I worked both in Calcutta and in other parts of the country. A few of us got together and eventually formed LOK Arts Collective. It gradually took the shape of a national youth arts movement.
My first feature film as an actor was Q’s Gandu. At the same time, I was conducting workshops at Delhi University where (film-maker) Mahesh Bhatt saw a play opening of mine and I was asked to audition for Aashiqui 2. While working on Aashiqui 2, I met (singer) Arijit Singh and we became very good friends. He inspired me a lot. All of this, along with all of my experiences — I have acted in over 25 Bangla films — fuelled my dream to become a film-maker. It actually started even before that, when my parents would take me to watch Rituparno Ghosh’s films in the theatres. On a subconscious level, I wanted to become a storyteller on that screen. The definition of the screen has changed over the years, it’s now come down to our mobile phones. But immersive content and what a film does to people remains the same, is what I believe.
