Bangladeshi filmmaker Mehedi Mostafa’s immersive essay on the sounds and sociality of Dhaka is a series of wonderments about place and home. Mostafa cuts between the city’s concrete chaos and the leisure of the faraway lush village with the curiosity of a poet-anthropologist. In capturing the labor and sweat of urban blue collar construction workers, he seems to also suggest their longings. In grounding his camera on the denizens of the streets, he tries to conjure in the viewer a sense of belonging.
Inspired by a talk by architect Keshef Mahboob Chowdhury, Mostafa never pretends he has answers. Instead his intuitive cinematography and imaginative sound design allow us to experience the paradoxes of the natural vs. the built, of utopia vs. the here-and-now.
Mehedi Mostafa
Born in Bangladesh, Mehedi Mostafa studied architecture in Dhaka before joining the Mumbai-based film school Whistling Woods International. In 2017, he finished his diploma in filmmaking with a directing specialization. He is currently working on a feature documentary project titled Making Places and developing a fiction feature film. He has attended Docedge Kolkata, Uniondocs Summer Documentary Lab, and the Locarno South Asia Industry Academy. His latest short documentary, Fantasy in a Concrete Jungle (2022), has been selected at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, where it has received the Lab Student Prize.
