Preface

I forget, therefore I log.

Escape from Cinema collects poems, prose-poems, visual readings, and short logs written between 2016 and 2020, while I was moving away from cinema — its craft, its festivals, its markets. It is the first volume in Zicobita, the longer archive of my poetic writing.

The book is not about quitting film. It is about watching the default — system, structure, self — and recording the friction in a low-fi, encoded form. Cinema is only the entry lens. The writing keeps reaching past it: to language, labor, class, the market, the plague, the city, the idea of home.

The numbers (১০১.১ through ১০৪.২) are not page numbers. They are logbook releases — the order in which I escaped, cycle by cycle. Read them as a slow descent: rehearsal (মহড়া), then the factory (কারখানা), then the plague (মড়ক).

Before the numbered logs sits পালানোর ইশকুল, a companion cycle. These are texts I wrote in 2016–17 to gather filmmakers around Biralpakhi Cine Club — the community that came before the escape, and the school it never became. I lineated them in 2026; they are marked as such.

The Bangla is primary and stays in its own register — colloquial, guru-chandali, deliberately “incorrect.” That register is the voice; I have not standardized it. English versions and endnotes come slowly, as a second reading rather than a translation.

I keep the original dates and sources. Where I edited in 2026, I say so. I cut the promotion, the results, the applause. What remains is for future me — I forget many things — and for anyone unsure whether a creative life has to stay inside one name.

— ইশতিয়াক জিকো, ২০২৬