Director
Almost everyone will watch a story. I am a psychiatrist, and I also make short films — about people I have met, and about the things that keep them from getting help.
Four of them are here.
Short film · 5:56
Her family came to Dhaka when the river took their land. Her father drives a rickshaw. She sells flowers at the traffic lights, and buys her mother’s medicine with what she earns.
Director’s note
Climate migration is usually told in numbers. I wanted one child, one street, and the arithmetic she does every evening — flowers sold, against what the medicine costs.
A diagnosis explains a person to a clinician. A story explains them to everyone else.
Short film · 3:04
A fire in Korail takes everything she owns. What it does to her mind takes longer to see, and longer to mend.
Director’s note
The fire is the easy part to show. What I was after is the months afterwards, when nothing looks wrong from outside and everything is. I wanted it to end with her working, not with her recovering.
The illness is rarely the hardest thing to show. The people standing around it are.
Short film · English subtitles · 2:32
A girl in Korail is unwell. What happens to her afterwards has less to do with her illness than with what the people around her decide it means.
Director’s note
Her illness was never the difficult thing to film. The neighbours were. So most of this is other people talking, and that is the point.
I am not trying to make suffering beautiful. I am trying to make it ordinary enough to talk about.
Awareness film · 4:39
A man falls ill. He goes to a kabiraj, then to a faith healer, and loses months to both. The treatment that finally works is ordinary medicine.
Director’s note
Every family I have treated knows this route. I did not want a villain in it — the kabiraj is not a monster, he is what was available. The film only asks how many months it costs.
If you are working on something that needs telling carefully, I would like to hear about it.
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