Saba: Bangladeshi director reveals car accident inspires his debut feature film

Bangladeshi filmmaker Maksud Hossain drew inspiration from a personal story to craft his debut feature, Saba, exploring the life of a young woman who single-handedly cares for her paraplegic mother.

The film, which was recently featured at the Red Sea International Film Festival, is confidently rooted in realism. It abstains from extraneous displays of drama to instead depict a moving slice-of-life story set in Dhaka.

This adherence to realism stemmed from the responsibility Hossain felt as he sought to translate a real-life event to the big screen.

“I came up with the story when I was thinking about this event,” Hossain says. “My wife and her mother were in a near-fatal car accident in Bangladesh almost 25 years ago. Ever since then, my mother-in-law has been a paraplegic and dependent on my wife and her father to take care of her on a daily basis.

"After the death of my father-in-law, I saw my wife really struggling to take care of her mother, even though she had access to money, family support and resources.”

Hossain began to ponder on a reality where they didn’t have the same support network and shared the concept with his wife, Trilora Khan. The two soon began to pen the film’s script. “What would a 25-year-old woman do in a situation like this to make sure that her mother lives at any cost?” Hossain says. “So from that idea, we came up with Saba.”

The film begins with Saba striving to meet her mother’s daily needs, such as bathing and preparing food. Their relationship is tense, becoming all the more so as Saba tries to secure money to pay for her mother’s surgery, landing a job in a shisha cafe.

Mehazabien Chowdhury takes on the role of Saba with finesse, delivering a riveting performance alongside her co-star Rokeya Prachy, who portrays her mother, Shrin. Chowdhury, who has appeared in hundreds of television productions in Bangladesh, says she was immediately drawn to the story when Hossein narrated it to her.

“The idea itself was so genuine,” she adds. “This is something that he and his wife had experienced, so they can give their authentic takes about the emotional traumas the characters go through. I felt having them on my side would make it easier for me to portray the character even more.”

In the film, Saba represents a gamut of emotions that range from love and care for her mother, to a feeling of suffocation that her condition inflicted upon her. Her experiences become more complex after she begins working and befriends cafe manager Ankur (Mostafa Monwar). Soon, she starts to imagine what her life outside her mother’s shadow would be like, a daydream rife with guilt.

As a character, Saba was thought-provoking. “Saba is not a single-layered character,” Chowdhury says. “She has so much going on. I have done a lot of roles in my life, over 400 dramas for television, but this was my first feature film for the theatre. I thought, maybe this was something that I was waiting for for my first movie. This will be a very emotional journey for whoever is watching it.”

The film’s cinematography also follows Saba’s inner life, ranging from wide frames to more claustrophobic shots as tensions flare. Cinematographer Barkat Hossain Polash says he was conscious of how the entire film pivots from Saba’s perspective and strove for the camera to reflect that.

“The camera was always following her,” he says. “We try to make this space as comfortable as possible, so Chowdhury can move freely.”

Polash says there were initially plans to compose the film using long and uninterrupted takes. However, it soon became clear that many of Saba’s emotions – and Chowdhury’s nuanced portrayal – would be lost. “We started covering different angles,” he says. “We tried to portray it as a documentary. A documentation of life. It didn't look very dramatic ... more like you are watching a documentary of the relationship between a mother and her daughter.”

Saba has been met with rave reviews, scoring an impressive 8.5 rating on IMDb. The experience, Hossain says, proved to himself that he was a capable director, and has him looking forward to future projects.

The film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival was particularly a highlight. His wife attended and by the time the credits appeared, “tears were rolling down her face", Hossein says.

“My wife was very moved by the film, which was a very big win for me," he adds. "Because it was out of respect for her mother and her story that I made the film.”

Another personal triumph came during the film’s first screening at the Red Sea International Film Festival. “I watched the film on the big screen with Spike Lee,” he says. “He was cackling and making comments. If something horrible was happening to the character, he was shouting: ‘Oh, no!’ That was great, I got a reaction out of Spike Lee!”