‘Dadasaheb Phalke’ Honour for ‘Tabeeb’ || Arya Chatterjee

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Bengali Director Bags ‘Dadasaheb Phalke’ Honour for ‘Tabeeb’, written By Arya Chatterjee

It has been almost a year the shoot of the short film ‘Tabeeb’ was complete. Post edit took few more months. And then, it created quite a wave with half a dozon of smooth entries to the prime short-film festivals including ‘Dada Saheb Phalke Short Film Festival: 2020’. 

This ‘Six Sigma’ production had ‘Boombazz Creation’ in collaboration from its scratch till the end.  The producer- director of the short film, Mr. Tanmay Nag is a poet-turned-director and leaving his IT Education business behind, had set sail for Mumbai to try out his aesthetics to be expressed in a different genre. Perhaps his hunger for expression was not satiated through writing poems. He wanted to create poetry on screen, because according to him, “In films even silence speaks.” He also had his reasons to fall back onto the short films, Firstly because “I find it befitting to the genre of poetry, not epics.” And secondly, “because I have an acute fund crunch because there is no one to understand and fund my kind of films at this point of time. What I am making are not commercially acceptable to the Indian viewers. Thus this is the form now I may run self-sufficient for. I am ensuring that I do not lift a project that I cannot carry.”

With various nominations and honours for “Tabeeb” Tanmay regrets that he had to bend the actual structure of the entire movie which he had made in a ‘documentary’ genre to talk about fiction based on reality. The edge of ‘documentary’ ran parallel to real life bites to add to the story which we generally term as ‘a fiction’. Tanmay was hard on the success of making his dream come true when he aspired to break the tradition with a concept that the reality bites would juxtapose the fictional tale to tell the audience that “Truth is greater than fiction”. 

However, this poetic composition was not accepted by the larger audience, though Tanmay reckons that “thousands of short films are made in India which have better merits than ‘Tabeeb’ …but this special composition was the only edge of the movie that would cut through and I think that the short was selected for the Dada Saheb Film Fest 2020 only for that unique perspective.” 

The director regrets that youtube had a different view on this and he had to succumb to the average outlook and re-edit the entire film before getting it posted in the google video platform to attract more views. “Someday people would understand the relevance of the original format “Tabeeb” was based upon. May be someone else would make both ends, the reality and the fiction juxtaposed, meet, in a much more smooth manner which would meet the standards and expectations of the larger audience, in future. I would rather be happy if I myself am able to do that. But for now, my form is a jerk to the mind of the audience…I still cannot take that seventeen good minutes of the original forty-five-minute-short had to be pruned to be left to a nothingness. All the poetry in the entire composition is gone now. ”

“Tabeeb – The Physician”, is a short film on the eroding values of the doctors around. The god’s descendents, as believed to be, are split apart between two choices- values of human life and taking laws in to hands to save lives contrasted to the minting money out of that socially respected figure. The story is told in black n’white without much of symbolisms and full of cuts. Due to the reinforcement of the re-editing sometimes the cuts are abrupt and the background track remains unmatched without having any aesthetic progression. The prime actors are excellent, especially the protagonist, while the supporting actors are at bay. Rajvir has delineated the character of a dignified doctor with real sense of values and responsibilities quite  beautifully with less of dialogues and more of expressions. “All these anomalies, excepting the acting skills, are because of the new rendition to the entire short”, as claims the producer-director Tanmay Nag. 

“I really am optimistic about making further movies in the genre I aspire for, and the faults in the previous ones will lead me to turn out to be a better story-teller in the shorts I create in poetic ways. My previous experiment ‘Kashak’ was a serious story-telling in all a silent manner and it also has its own progression, mounting and success in its own way. Unless and until we, the directors, show the audience something new, they will never have the urge to get adapted to the tastes of the new genres”, says Tanmay, a brave-heart in the midst of commercialization of everything. 

It sounds like a new flavour of wine to get adapted to, to like it after quite some time. Adaptation in aesthetic taste happens over a period of time.

Exposures & Credentials:

10th Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival, 2020

Best Medical Health Short: Model and Movie International Short Film Festival, 2019

Benaras Hindu University, Bengali Department, 2020

Link  to “Tabeeb”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFRCAyfA1Xo

Link to “Kashak”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kiIEqxcjPg