Idle Talk with Ishtiaque Zico

English translation of the author’s Bangla rough cut, revised against the original. The conversation and its plans retain their 2017 perspective. Translation notes follow the interview. The Bangla remains the text of record.

Bangla original: ইশতিয়াক জিকোর সঙ্গে বাইক্কা আলাপ

Nazmul Hoque Nayeem. An architecture graduate from BUET. He teaches at a private university for a living. Makes films alongside that. I enjoy his company, the way he thinks. One day he asked to do a formal interview. He shook the footbridge; I danced along. That got a lot out of me. The final cut appeared in Bangla Movie Database’s online Eid issue (link in the endnotes). Thanks to Nayeem and the BMDB family — for giving me the time of day. All this free publicity has me feeling a bit festive. Like Eid.^[1]

Let this rough cut of the conversation stay here.

Nayeem: Let’s get the usual question out of the way. How are you?

Zico: Say I’m strolling through the neighborhood. Or scrolling through Facebook. I run into an elder I barely know. They ask me the same question. I might say, “Fine, getting by. How about you?” Same answer back. “Doing fine. Come by the house sometime.” Then we go our separate ways.

We go through these rituals every day, don’t we? Say you’re not fine and things get uncomfortable. On both sides. A second question, a third, then more. The weight of having asked. The sympathy face you offer when someone tells you they’re not doing well. You ask to get a duty out of the way. Now the asking leaves you with a duty of its own. An act of social balance goes out of balance.

But once we’ve discharged the formal duty of “how are you” — or if the publication has space to spare — we can open this up a little.

There are two sides to it. When I’m conscious of the here and now — keeping up with what’s happening around me — I sometimes get very upset. Restless. It’s painful to live with the meaninglessness of existence. People near and far all seem to inhabit a two-dimensional plane. So many whys keep after me. A running battle with myself, in my own head, moment to moment.

The other side is when a cosmic sense of time and space takes hold. Then I try to lose myself in trivial work. Idle work. Non-work. Useless work. The passivity. The nonproductivity. I mean, anything that earns no money, no respect or serves no worldly purpose — that’s what people call non-work, isn’t it? So that’s the non-work I do.^[2] The pleasure of being absorbed in something so trivial, so useless, feels different from escapism. Non-work carries responsibilities. Political responsibilities. But the urge to escape seems to want to evade them. The struggle to stay alive is political. That’s how I see it.

I was talking about the present. Instant time. When I get a little beyond its pressure, I feel at peace. I take comfort in this: I chose financial uncertainty of my own accord. The responsibility is mine by default. I’m not plotting to increase profits behind a show of social service. Perhaps I struggle with myself for the pleasure of finding that it’s possible to live in peace without surrendering entirely to money. There’s a price to pay for living this way, though. I justify it as a fact of arithmetic. When division leaves a nonzero remainder, don’t we accept that?

Anyway, if this sounds too heavy, put in a few emoticons when you publish it. We’re getting time-strapped day by day. As if it were all the fault of a hyperlink! ^[3]

Nayeem: You chose to do this political non-work, this useless work, of your own accord, I take it. Maybe that’s the weight you carry for refusing to run away. :) You didn’t go after bigger profits. You left the here and now to think about deep time. And yet you’re a filmmaker, an organizer and a teacher, all at once. You write on a blog under the name Zicobaji. Which identity do you like best?

Zico: I like all the work I do. There’s no eternal hierarchy to what I like. But by identity, I think you mean the adjective you’d put next to my name. The label. Before sticking a label on me, let’s look at what I do. What am I actually up to? In public, lately: doing the practical groundwork for a feature-length film. Turning up at Biralpakhi Cine Club’s mojmas and study circles.^[4] Learning a few things myself in the name of training newcomers. And lately, posting this and that on Facebook. A lot.

At the end of the day, nobody asks whether I want to be identified by everything I’ve willingly done — accidental or incidental. Look how linear, how simple we’ve made the connection between work and label. Zico has directed films, so pin the “filmmaker” label on him. Easy to put on someone. Easy to wear. Plenty of stereotyping. I mean, does moving a file into a labeled folder guarantee it an identity of its own? :)

Second, the more labels I — we — accept for the sake of identity, the more weight we take on. Even when we don’t want that weight, we have to accept the labels for practical reasons. In the world of earning a living, being unlabeled means being unclaimed, illegitimate, somehow even immoral. Call it the irony of identity!

Third, every label produces one or more public images. And an image has a frame. Take “filmmaker.” Hear it and you picture a person. Camera in hand. Shooting. Or editing. An image of action in the present indefinite — until death.^[5]

Maybe that person isn’t always shooting or editing. Maybe preparation means earning a living while coming to a deeper understanding of life, unlearning familiar things or catching your breath before demanding work. All of that stays outside the frame.

The long, exhausting, painful days and nights before production don’t figure in that public image. Oh, you’re not making a film? Then your label is out of date. Problematic. Filmmaker, teacher, organizer — every label produces an image of the self and calls it a day. No concern for the self. Yet it’s the self that has to carry that cruel label’s weight.

And notice the order: after those three adjectives, you didn’t call me a blogger. You said I write on a blog. Three labels. One act. Perhaps you thought: call me a blogger and who’s going to keep me safe tomorrow? Out of empathy, you safely highlighted the work instead.

Another thing. Do any work other than officiating at weddings — play cricket, say — and nobody calls you a kazi. Yet “kazi” doesn’t bring to mind someone who gets things done, either.^[6] So it’s the work, more than the label, that interests me, concerns me, makes me curious.

Nayeem: So all these labels keep us from being unclaimed. And so much invisible activity stays outside their frame — what you label the preparation phase. I think that phase does a lot to determine the frame’s size and shape. Anyway, whether it was to protect you from the protectors — Hefazat —^[7] or because your other labels already hold their ground, I didn’t want to call you a blogger. :D

Let’s turn to something else. Tell me how you came to filmmaking. Who drew you in? Who inspired you? Tell us a little more.

Zico: The backstory — how far back should I go? As a child, I often heard stories about my maternal uncle from my mother and aunt. About his architecture studies. About cinema. About casting Joygun in Surja Dighal Bari. My uncle never told me those film stories himself. I hadn’t even seen the whole film then. Until my teens, I wasn’t particularly interested in cinema. His writing and drawing interested me more. I remember a sketch he did of a slum. Perhaps just a few strokes, but it made an enormous impression. I can’t remember the magazine’s name.

What I mean is, my uncle may not have directly inspired me to work in film. Indirectly, certainly. The direct encouragement was my family’s tacit consent. I didn’t have to struggle to convince them that “getting into” cinema didn’t mean going to ruin. A path without that struggle — without all that emotional upheaval.^[8] My uncle’s work certainly helped clear it.

Speaking of inspiration, I think of my two elder brothers. We are three brothers. I’m the youngest. Rahat is the eldest. He is about twelve years older than me. This is the early nineties. He was making electronic gadgets then, running a science club and also painting, listening to music, singing, writing under his own and other names, reciting, winning prizes, wandering in his own way. My brother’s moving across many disciplines motivated me a lot.

The middle brother, Ifteekhar, almost eight years older than me, had another nature. He played a lot of chess, read a lot, did left politics, did welfare work in the neighborhood. A big quality I saw in him was handling things. Management. He steps forward to handle any worldly trouble. It was this middle one who took me to the Marieta bookshop at the stadium, to the USIS at Dilkusha, to the sidewalk bookstalls of Purana Paltan, to the Russian cultural center to see Shareng Bou. A new world beyond school textbooks.

Two brothers, two ways of doing things. One: keep doing new things with new ideas. The other: don’t do it alone, bring everyone along. Next to my older brothers’ varied pursuits, my own ventures probably seemed like plain rice and lentils to my parents. With all due respect to rice and lentils. So much for my brothers. Let’s leave Ammu and Abbu — Mom and Dad — aside for now. They’re so much a part of me that this conversation would never end.

Back to the science club. Like my older brothers, I started going as a child. Anushandhitshu Chakra. A Bangla name. We met every Friday. I spent time with all sorts of people. Did all sorts of things, watched all sorts of things. The club helped break many of those molds of mediocrity. I’m reserved by nature, yet I’m not afraid to get up on a platform. I can write a little. Appreciate a layer of rationality beyond emotion. Compare the structures of stories I hear. The science club contributed a lot to all that. Perhaps these are my underlying, invisible inspirations.

I did plenty else as a teenager. Speaking from memory here. It’ll be nonlinear. Falling in love in secret, exchanging weighty, learned letters, getting my heart broken, learning computer programming, joining open source initiatives, designing websites, starting out in journalism, getting hooked on typography, wanting to be a writer, wanting to be a philosopher — then finding no way forward or seeing the mediocrity around me, getting fed up with everything. When I think of those teenage years — what energy!

The next chapter is university. I first enrolled in mathematics at the University of Dhaka. Partway through, against my family’s wishes, I went off to Kolkata. Enrolled at an obscure college. Telecommunications engineering. Couldn’t settle into it. Gave up being stubborn and came home. Back to Dhaka. Back to mathematics.

I was never brilliant at mathematics. But its philosophical foundations fascinated me. I revered them. By then I’d heard of Thomas Kuhn, Paul Erdős, Ramanujan and Gödel. Buried my nose in Bertrand Russell, Aroj Ali Matubbar and Prabir Ghosh. But university was another story. Brother, the teaching was terribly unromantic. Worse, devoid of philosophy. All cram notes. Memorize theorems and regurgitate them. I couldn’t settle into class. Studying mathematics taught me, in my bones, how demotivating and lifeless a classroom could be. Not even school or college had been like that. At university, only Amal Halder’s way of teaching caught my interest. How the presentation of a subject could make you want to learn — that stood out.

Anyway, to keep from losing myself under all those cram notes, I started plotting something new again. That’s when I rediscovered cinema. Began a new relationship with it. Attending festivals at the Public Library, watching films, editing pieces for the festival bulletins. I began to sense cinema’s all-consuming power. Its ability to work on an audience emotionally and intellectually at once.

There was no arrangement for watching films at home. My university classmate Jakir was my partner in crime. Sitting in his room at Shahidullah Hall, on rented CDs and DVDs, I first saw Citizen Kane, The 400 Blows, the Dekalog. Then there was an organization called CAAC (Centre for Asian Art and Culture) at Science Lab. They screened films regularly. Rajen Tarafder’s Palanka, Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik, Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane: that’s how my acquaintance with such films began. Not that I understood everything. Maybe I stared more than I watched, thought of something else, drifted from one thought to another. I started watching the rest of their other films only recently. I was watching Mrinal Sen’s films. I keep discovering new things. Watching it all back then would surely have given me indigestion.

I had a part-time writing job at Bengal Foundation then. Between tasks, I used the office printer to print whatever I could find on filmmaking. Bound it into books and read. Hunted for film books at Aziz Market. Márquez’s screenwriting workshop book, Kemon Kore Golpo Hoy and Satyajit Ray’s Bishoy: Chalachchitra were probably the first Bangla books on cinema I really savored. I liked Gaston Roberge’s writing too.

Between all that watching, I tried making a short exercise film. One day Jakir called: a student had been killed by a bus at Shahbag. Named Happy. He described an image: “Imagine a bus running over a flower, not Happy.” For some reason, that clichéd metaphor set something off in me. I could see it immediately. Shot after shot. Scene after scene. I stepped outside theory and went out to practice. Learned that watching is one thing, making another. With no hands-on experience, I took a year to finish a five-minute production. I think of that year as my first technical schooling in filmmaking.

Nayeem: Whether from hearing about your uncle or seeing him, an image formed in your mind: of a filmmaker. Surely not a conventional one. You were influenced by someone whose work caught critics’ attention at home and abroad but didn’t run in cinema halls. The so-called industry labels such a person a flop. And your two brothers influenced your structured, linear and nonlinear, sense of life. You gathered your film education on your own initiative from many sources. Your academic study was mathematics, yet your career is in cinema. Why? Was it that you didn’t want to get stuck in the rote formulas of cribbed notes?

Zico: Those childhood stories had already given me a sense that academic training wasn’t a prerequisite for making films. My uncle Shaker studied architecture. But he made a film. He managed it. How?

Many will say architecture and cinema share a deep understanding as disciplines. But I believe that whatever the discipline, what matters is how much you took from it. Even if someone’s academic discipline is the Pali language, no problem. Because every discipline only hands you generic tools. Disciplines only tell you how to analyze the world from one perspective. Beyond that, other perspectives, knowledge, experience, sense, wisdom: these perhaps come from outside the academy.

So there’s nothing to worry about. Those years spent studying mathematics taught me to appreciate and apply some of its tools. The same tools serve me in cinema, directly or indirectly. What matters is where the passion lies. That’s what pushes you to look deeper, experience things, live them. And although I put my labor into film production, I never wanted to treat cinema simply as a career opportunity. Never will. My relationship with cinema is perhaps undefined.

Nayeem: I see. Mathematics played an indirect role in your understanding of cinema’s disciplinary tools. Driven by passion, you ran through the lanes of cinema. You entered an undefined relationship. Then you made a few practice works on your own. You made 720 Degrees and travelled to Venice and other festivals. You have represented Bangladesh at international film festivals. How was the festival experience?

Zico: With all humility, I’d say I represent the work — the film — first. Then myself as its maker. Then Bangladesh. Country and state are different concepts too. I see the country as a geographical and cultural birthplace. A home. The state is a political organization. Its structure is complex. In representing a work of art, that layer of state representation may be heavier, harder for me to carry. I still don’t fully understand this business of representing a state.

The festival experience is mixed. Let me tell a few at random. In Venice, I found 720 Degrees was the only film from Bangladesh. But nowhere at the venue was there the country’s flag. Everyone else’s flags were flying. I told the festival office. They admitted the mistake, apologized and put up the flag a few days later. I don’t know. Maybe then the sense of the state pressed harder on me than the person or the artwork.

Then an audience member in Rotterdam said: your film is very nationalistic. I was surprised. Tried to push back a little. They said: look at the image in your film. The way you enclose it in a circle — it looks just like Bangladesh’s flag. I laughed. Said: well, that’s a different reading. Thought to myself: then what did Japan do wrong?

Then, at a screening in Tokyo, I realized: there’s plenty of festival fanfare. Plenty of care for me. Bangladesh is there. Only the film is missing. Nobody’s talking about its themes or content.

At big festivals, young independent filmmakers seem to be pushed into a corner. For example, I had no sales agent. I had to do the promotion myself. Brother, do come, do watch. Like a street canvasser. Talking to possible producers with a smiling face. You have seen that interview clip of Tarkovsky, haven’t you, where he keeps saying that cinema now has to be sold like cigarettes or any other product? Moving through festivals, I felt that many times.

In my experience, festival selections and awards do encourage you. But they can also paralyze a young filmmaker. The self gets lost. Its image starts to loom larger. Self-censorship creeps in. Blocks appear. You carry the lopsided weight of that festival label for years, perhaps for life. Pride takes over. The innocent relationship with cinema goes. It happened to me. Perhaps getting past it’s what’s taking all these years.

Still, you can’t always ignore festivals. These days I appreciate events carrying the film-festival label as marketplaces. Meeting grounds for co-production. Opportunities to network with artists and non-artists from different countries. Parts of the factory.

Festivals have done something else for me: broken much of their own spell, their own mythology. I no longer count laurels to decide whether I should like a film. Like films, festivals vary and judgments about them are subjective. Cinema is struggling to survive alongside other media. Festivals are struggling too, each changing tactics in its own way. Being aware of that, keeping some distance, perhaps helps loosen the attachment. Behind the label, you can stay absorbed in the work.

Nayeem: So you see festivals with a kind of market purpose. You are not chasing festivals and you don’t want to supply content like the products of the mainstream factory either. In keeping an innocent relationship, you’re about to put on a new label. As if you care more for Test matches than for T20.^[9] Well, in this country many people work in television fiction before making films. But you didn’t take that road. Why?

Zico: It’s not that I didn’t try television. I couldn’t get in. At one point I thought — why be so elitist? People do all sorts of things for a living. Why not direct TV content? I tried. Couldn’t manage it. I’m not very good at the pushing and grabbing. Meanwhile, I followed Tareque Masud’s way of living from a distance. Perhaps he was an inspiration too.

I could not get in, but many of my time did. It is also true that everyone’s situation is different. Paths are different. The television channels then could read the pulse of young people and create room for exchange. On the other hand, the local factories of cinema didn’t pay attention to young people’s pulse. Take the FDC. A den of bureaucracy. Full of syndicates. I tried to get in there too. It is very hard to get in.

And the mechanism of television feels different from cinema. Its policy goes like this: buy time from corporate sponsors. Whatever time is left, fill it with flashy content. Look at their tactic. To impress,^[10] they came down wearing the mask of film producers themselves. As I said, reading the market’s demand. Catching the pulse. They managed it. The young saw the mask: we’ll make films, on celluloid at that, what is the harm? There is money, pour it in, premiere it on TV between the advertisements. Money recovered. Where here is the diversity of cinema, the maker’s own voice, the savor of the work beyond commerce?

Another reason I couldn’t get into TV was its manner. Television practice is very monolithic. The way TV generally wants to present things audiovisually may not be the way I want to. I don’t mean shot size or screen size. I mean the representation of people, time and space. On TV, that feels insensitive.

Say I want to show the social identity crisis of a same-sex couple, their inner struggle. In the design, I keep close-up shots but long takes, full of dialogue but without non-diegetic music,^[11] a somewhat anti-dramatic narrative structure, the image tone black and white and underexposed and no commercial breaks during broadcast. Will the TV medium accept these conditions? Forget appreciating the idea, will it even approve it? The cinema medium will. Some producer, distributor or exhibitor will even step forward for it.

TV programming guesses at the limits of an audience’s taste — a target audience approved by the sponsor’s agency. So what I want or don’t want is hardly TV’s concern. And there’s no shortage of people who understand its formats and standards and supply the market accordingly. I tried arguing with TV people about this. Then I understood: here, the poet falls silent.^[12]

The more I practice cinema, the more I realize how much more inclusive it’s than TV. More contemplative. Sensitive. Tolerant. Perhaps these were the qualities I’d been looking for all along — in one medium of expression or another. So I decided to put myself in cinema’s service.

Nayeem: Say the TV people agreed to the conditions: long takes, no music, anti-dramatic structure, black and white underexposed, broadcast without breaks. Would you’ve come to TV fiction or would you now?

Zico: If TV becomes that accommodating, I’ve no allergy to working in it. But lately I’m interested in making work for online platforms. More freedom with narrative and experimentation.

Looking at cinema as it’s practiced around me, I feel we’ve kept dragging the medium along merely to serve literary storytelling. That’s why filmmakers and audiences alike still struggle to distinguish what’s cinematic, what’s dramatic and what’s theatrical.

Nayeem: What are your thoughts on filmmaking in this country? Mainstream cinema is in the hands of co-productions. Mostofa Sarwar Farooki worked with Jaaz. How do you see these things?

Zico: Ideally, I’ve no objection to any stream or any alliance. I like diversity. Let them come to produce, India or Saudi Arabia, Singapore or Latvia. Co-production expands the labor market, there’s exchange, let it happen.

In practice, what do the films’ content and forms look like? All cast in the same mold? Copy-paste? A Tollywood ghost dressed up and given a makeover? And where are the films distributed, on what terms, with what shares? Joint in name, one-sided in practice. No diversity, no artistic effort. That’s where the trouble lies.

But I think those who want to use cinema only to practice nationalism should rather make more local content in local ways. Supply it at home and abroad. The nationalist zeal we get only from being anti-India, doesn’t it seem quite extreme?

Nayeem: So co-production doesn’t make you itch. It’s the smell that worries you — what the thing turns out like. :) Tell us about your new film, Cinema, City and Cats. You’ve just been to Locarno.

Zico: Locarno was a new experience. Pitching there showed me how unprepared and scattered I was. Getting local contexts across in the right tone is tricky too. International production takes a long time. For now, two production companies from two countries are involved. Akanga Asia from Singapore. Khona Talkies from Bangladesh. I’m looking for more producers to fund the production. It’ll take time.

For now, in this preparation phase, I’m catching my breath. Trying to separate signal from noise. What I’ve taught all these years is really a basic understanding of the discipline. Beyond that, I’m trying to discover what else I understand about life and cinema. Growing antibodies against the spell of favorite films and filmmakers. In my own way. There’s no hurry, I feel. I need to clear other work out of the way and go a little deeper. On the timeline I’ve set, the project will take until 2020. Until then, I’ve to keep up the struggle to live decently. Everyone’s circumstances are different. So my competition, my negotiation, my struggle here is with my own circumstances.

For now, I want to sketch some people and relationships in Dhaka from my own experience. I was born and raised entirely here. So many kinds of people, so much relocation and migration — where do I belong in all that? How much do I belong? Urban identity may be central to the film. I’m looking for others like me, suspended in an undefined relationship with the city. People for whom the link between the work of living and the label of a livelihood isn’t straightforward. Perhaps there’s an anthropological approach there. Anyway, better not babble too much about a film that hasn’t been made, eh?

Nayeem: Well said. Better to see the making of image and sound itself, after release. :D But one more curiosity: two kinds of approaches show up in this country’s film practice. Some only target festivals abroad. Some make commercial films in the mainstream. What are you keeping in mind for your new feature?

Zico: Well, the adjective you used, mainstream commercial cinema: should I take it to mean productions by FDC, Impress and Jaaz? I don’t think I can associate with those productions. There is no experiment with the medium. The production techniques and formulas are very familiar, used again and again. The presence of people and relationships is very plastic, colorful and two-dimensional. When and how the audience will be moved is pointed out with a finger. None of that holds my interest.

And making a film targeting festivals is like throwing a stone in the dark. Those who have not experienced festivals abroad seem to target them this way. Because there are countless festivals, with all kinds of programming. And if you follow even the old brand festivals like Cannes, Venice and Berlin, you will see they are busy revising their own targets. They experiment themselves. Sometimes they make room for cross-media, sometimes they promote low budgets, sometimes they want to become the Oscars, sometimes they bring their geopolitical issues forward, sometimes they open two intercontinental markets, sometimes they curate content through local consultants. Very unpredictable, uncertain. And there’s no generic festival formula that, if you follow it, the festivals will take your film.

As I prepare my first feature, I want to keep my greed in check. Stay innocent. In the thinking and design, keep asking whether the film is true to my understanding. Don’t use techniques without a reason. Don’t dissect a few approved, stamped-and-sealed films from favorite festivals and cook up a hotchpotch. Don’t lose myself trying to reach the general public. Making something to please everybody, to cater to everybody, is exhausting. What I mean is: I want to be able to stand behind my own film as its maker.

Still, I’d like films labeled independent or auteur to do business at home and abroad too. If the money comes back, I imagine producers and investors won’t be unhappy. But I’m fairly sure mine won’t. I don’t want to make the narrative compromises needed to recover the investment commercially. Yet perhaps a producer or two will take the risk. Perhaps they hope a festival selection will add weight to their portfolio. Happily, my producers haven’t put commercial or festival pressure on me so far. My thanks to them.

Nayeem: You used to be called a dealer in small films. Why did you take on a feature film?

Zico: It was Mostofa Sarwar Farooki who first introduced me under this label, a dealer in short films. In an article in Prothom Alo. A few years ago, in some conversation, I said I enjoy short films more. Back then I was in a five-country omnibus project called Southeast Loves. It didn’t happen in the end. And 720 Degrees went to Venice then. Maybe he gave me this label judging by all that.

And it’s true. The short form is very challenging. There’s more scope to work against the establishment. But no single running time can hold every kind of experience or understanding. Say The Turin Horse lasted five minutes. Would it have the same impact?

I decided to make a feature because, for the time-sketch I want to draw of a city, its people and its relationships, I think the feature length is the right fit. And there was and is, a wish to free my identity from the label of length or format.

Nayeem: Ah. The Turin Horse. Such a beautiful presentation on a big canvas. After Tarkovsky, perhaps it was Béla Tarr who did it. Lav Diaz is doing it in his own way. And speaking of omnibus projects reminds me: you launched an omnibus project under the Biralpakhi banner last year. What news of it? And what do you think about film schools or schooling?

Zico: What do film schools say? Come to school so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel again and again. Learn techniques, learn craft, tell your own story. That is how today’s film schools, institutes and academies promote themselves.

Formal film schooling teaches the techniques the factory approves and uses. It may save time. But learning the hard way has its own pleasures. Otherwise, some minds might grow lazy. Finding new techniques, a language, a manner, conventions of your own — narrative or non-narrative — takes pain, imagination and labor. Perhaps those aren’t on the academic syllabus.

The role of film schools is changing too. Technical information is overflowing everywhere. So schools have turned to curating knowledge. Everyone stresses networking. Learning the language of new media. The expectation is that new media will rule in the future. Once theater was the medium of creative expression, now cinema, later perhaps games or apps. The market wants to offer new experiences too. 3D cinema and augmented reality are new experiences. So market interests are supporting Western schools in shaping their teaching methods.

But I don’t think everyone needs formal schooling. There are other ways. Unschooling, for example. Its “philosophy” is that learning has no fixed curriculum. No rush to guess what you’ll need in the future and teach it all beforehand. Learn what you need, when you need it. Jonas Mekas’s approach seems to me a kind of unschooling.

And the Biralpakhi omnibus is now in post. It is coming next year.

Nayeem: Unschooling or unlearning, whatever you call it, is needed to widen one’s own range. I think this unlearning is needed for thought to grow beyond custom and convention. Let me ask a stereotyped question: whose filmmaking do you like? At home or abroad.

Zico: Liking changes. Among fellows at home, I like Mahde Hasan’s work. But among those whose films made me think and keep making me think, as I start my first feature project: Roy Andersson, Mrinal Sen, Béla Tarr, Lav Diaz, Tsai Ming-liang, Michael Haneke, Pedro Costa, Ho Tzu Nyen, Sion Sono, Jafar Panahi, Jim Jarmusch. Their cinematic design of time and space and their handling of narrative are interesting. There is no hurry just to show the event. Their films hold the line against the habit of cinematic language that has spread everywhere, built on the tricks of suspense and magic.

Nayeem: So you like watching the ones who can bowl a good slow ball with time and space. I’ve seen Mahde Hasan’s I Am Time. There’s some experimenting going on there too. Now for the big question. In the age of Netflix, YouTube and streaming, what shape will cinema take? What will people who want to make films do? What should they do?

Zico: A few notes to myself, then.

1. Cinema is for sapiens. Anthropologically speaking. It gives people a particular kind of experience. Wakes something up in them. I need to pay attention to how people sense and make sense of the world. What do I miss when I say “people” as if everyone experienced the world the same way? Everyone matters. Cultures and civilizations have histories of their own. How do I represent the people whose lives I’m drawing on?

2. A feel for the medium comes first. I have to get a taste of cinema itself. Find out what it can do and where it runs up against its limits. Where it meets other media. Where it departs with them.

3. Technology is not cinema. Still, cinema depends on it. Today, streaming. Tomorrow, interactive holographic projection. The day after, some other way to distribute a film or project it. Each change alters how people experience cinema. How, and by how much? Something to think through. Say “Come to the movie theater” all we like. People will still get their taste of cinema on phones and tablets (the kind you don’t swallow). I need to think about the devices my film will be seen and heard through.

4. Filmmaking is interactive design. I can think about it the way I’d think about building a website or writing software. Change the design and you change how someone experiences the film.

Nayeem: Interactive design means treating it somewhat like a game. You believe in tasting cinema beyond technology. You want to push the boundary. So what does it come to: do you believe in any particular lineage of cinema? I hear you like a lot of experimental work.

Zico: Lineage, and we’re back to labels, genres, and tags talks. Allow me to believe in cinema. The kind of cinematic expression that has room to experiment, to extend its definition, its limitations. I like it when cinema start transgressing such labels. Between fiction and nonfiction, Live action and animation, Narrative and non-narrative, Celluloid and digital. observation and experiment happens when you ignore the imposed labels and boundaries.

I haven’t made much myself. But I enjoy other people’s experiments. Try to read them critically. Consider what those signs of experimentation mean, what feelings they bring about.

Nayeem: You run an organization called Biralpakhi Cine Club. Why this name? What response are you getting?

Zico: Peers ask that a lot. Let me repeat the manifesto behind: Biralpakhi is a new myth, contemporary hybrid stuff. Like Sukumar’s duck-porcupine, stork-tortoise, lion-deer, elephant-whale. Or the unicorn, Buraq, mermaid, sphinx or Ganesha of older myths. A cat is curious. A bird takes flight. Biralpakhi is their montage. A signifier, too. A synthesis. A guruchandali liberty.^[13] Biralpakhi is a proposal. A proposed cinematic god.

Biralpakhi’s getting a good response. In our first year: 12 mojmas. Four workshops. Two study circles. Publications coming up. Government registration formalities completed. Seventy film-construction workers have asked to join. And here’s something hopeful: the mojmas have prompted several hundred short exercise films or experiments. We’ve held their first screenings at the gatherings.

Nayeem: This mojma is quite inspiring for newcomers. A new platform to show new work or to put on a new label. Many film society movements exist or existed in this country. How is this one different?

Zico: First of all, Biralpakhi Cine Club isn’t just for spectators. It’s for makers, for crew behind the cinema. An organization of young film construction labourers. We want to build a network of filmmakers, film crew and people who love making films. Someone looking for their own, homegrown, free from spending a lot of money, off-route ways to tell stories in a avant-garde language.^[14] That’s it for now. Let’s do the work. Then we’ll see.

Nayeem: So this club thinks about makers, not audiences. What are the future plans for the club?

Zico: The plan for this year: keep the mojmas, training workshops and study circles going. Start a residency. Bring out a film journal. Launch a website. Finish the omnibus film project we started last year.

Nayeem: Best wishes. For you. For Biralpakhi. Zico Bhai, thank you for your time. Take care.

Zico: I’ll. You too. Come by the house.

Nayeem: I’ll. No doubt your taste in cooking is good too. Wouldn’t mind a chance to pin another label on you. :D

Translation endnotes§