Jim Burroughs shooting at the Calcutta Book Fair on Tuesday. Picture by Aranya Sen

Filming the book fair was the last thing on Jim Burroughs?s mind when he decided to come to Calcutta on a vacation at a friend?s request. On Tuesday though, the Oscar-winning documentary film-maker ended up roaming the fair grounds armed with a camcorder, trailing book lovers, crowded stalls and poet Subodh Sarkar reading out from his work.

?I was coming here on a vacation and have suddenly been pulled into my metier, which is making documentary films,? says Burroughs, who also teaches at University of California.

?It (the Book Fair) is magical. It?s hands-on; it?s like jazz? I want to film till the last day when the bell rings. It?s a big surprise to see so many people dedicated to books, not video games, and I think it?s a wonderful message for the US,? says Burroughs, having won ?an Academy Award for the documentary film La Belle Epoque?. He was nominated for another Oscar for his documentary Against Wind and Tide: A Cuban Odyssey. The Quest of Ark also won Burroughs laurels at several film festivals.

?La Belle Epoque shows the breakthroughs in Europe between 1890 and 1914 and also how it contained the seeds of destruction at the same time. The Cuba documentary contained portions on Fidel Castro? My documentaries have always elicited extreme reactions from the Left and Right wing parties,? says the white-haired film-maker.

Burroughs was coaxed to visit Calcutta during the book fair by his US-based friend Goutam Datta. The two now have a common goal of bringing ?the US to the Calcutta Book Fair?.

Though he didn?t have any plans to shoot in Calcutta, Burroughs was bowled over by the vibrancy of the fair. ?I captured people reading poetry, people picking books? I want to focus on the universality and the seriousness of the fair. The combination of multiple languages ? there?s English, a lot of Spanish and Bengali, of course? Calcutta is a combination of the colours of Paris and the energy of New York.?

The film-maker is currently busy with the yet-to-be-released The Shadow of Afghanistan, the documentary he has spent years filming in Afghanistan. ?We started filming from 1986 till the present times. We want to show that Afghans are not extremists,? says Burroughs, planning to bring the film to Calcutta some time next year. On the agenda is a project on issues of water and the problems triggered by global warming.