May 2: The houseful 7.40pm show of Bahubali: The Conclusion at INOX (Forum) on May Day would have been just another statistic in the film's box-office success but for the presence of some faces in the audience. Occupying 40-odd seats in the audi was a group that had travelled all the way from Dhaka to see a film that had bypassed Bangladesh.
The S.S. Rajamouli-directed blockbuster had a worldwide release on April 28, hitting 9,000 screens on the same day. The film's distributor, Karan Johar, tweeted today that the film's Hindi, Telugu and Tamil versions had together earned Rs 383 crore across India in four days.
But just like the first film of the franchise, Bahubali: The Beginning, the sequel did not make it to theatres in Bangladesh. This time, 38 Bangladeshis aged six to 66 decided that they wouldn't be denied the "visual grandeur" of a Bahubali movie for the second time. One of them got a friend in Calcutta to block tickets and the group flew down to Calcutta on Monday morning to catch an evening show. Mission accomplished, they are scheduled to return home on Wednesday.
"We all have DVDs of the first Bahubali movie. The visual grandeur is mesmerising even in the living room. But the experience was richer in a movie hall," said 63-year-old Sanaul Arfeen, who owns the Dhaka-based ad agency Matra.
Also in the group were Faridul Reza Sagar, managing director of the Bangladeshi entertainment channel Channel-I, Imdadul Haq Milan, editor of the daily Kaler Kantha, and theatre actor and ad agency owner Afzal Hossain, accompanied by wife Tazeen Halim, a fashion designer.
In Bangladesh, only those foreign films shot in the country or co-produced by Bangladeshis - Goutam Ghose's Moner Manush is one - are shown in theatres, said Arfeen. Another way for theatres to show Indian and other foreign films is through a kind of exchange process where a Bangladeshi film gets released in the other country.
Eager as they were for the theatre experience of a Bahubali opus, the group from Bangladesh had reached INOX (Forum) almost an hour before the Monday evening show. Some three-and-a-half hours later, the consensus was that the movie was worth the one-hour flight from Dhaka. "It seems every bit worth it.... The fights were awesome, even better than the first movie," gushed Tasnisha Nahar Roza, 14.
The teenager declared that she had seen the first Bahubali movie on video 80 times. Only one person in the group, businessman Amir Hossain Khokon, had watched Bahubali: The Beginning in a theatre in 2015. That too was in Calcutta.
As they exited the audi, one of the teenagers in the group told her friend that she wished to become an actress after watching Anushka Shetty as the princess Devasana. An uncle who overheard this deadpanned: " Tor baap jaane (Does your father know)?"
The laughter that echoed around them summed up the fun-filled evening. "We are absolutely thrilled to have so many people from Bangladesh book tickets for the film, something that to the best of my knowledge has happened for the first time at any screen in Calcutta," said Subhasis Ganguli, regional director (east) of INOX.
