Canadian Premiere
The Rocket—actually a rather placid paddle steamer—has been ferrying rich and poor through the wide, slow, shallow rivers of Bangladesh for the best part of a century. Kamar Ahmad Simon’s kinetic and artfully chaotic film is a travelogue with staged elements. In this hybrid fiction blended with reality, actors impersonate student journalists who record an interview with a couple of government politicians (also actors); a YouTuber vlogs his journey with manufactured rapture (cinephiles may think of Geraldine Chaplin’s BBC reporter in Altman’s Nashville); and a deck passenger angrily confronts the steward blocking his access to toilets reserved for the cabin class. If Kamar has laced this two-day odyssey with sociopolitical commentary, you could be forgiven for taking everything at face value: the movie has the electrical charge of observational documentary, the camera drifts across faces, personalities, landscapes, jokes, squabbles, songs, and then moves on. It’s a snapshot of an entire country, so vivid you can smell it.
Delightful… Simon documents the journey with both geographical and sociopolitical fascination, drinking in the scenery while wryly observing the tangle of classes, castes and character types on deck. The loose, entertaining result is equal parts leisurely travelogue, observational social study and droll real-life comedy of errors.”—Guy Lodge, Variety
Harrell Award for the best film in Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) 2022
Media Partner
Kazi Md. Mohsin, Abdullah Al-Mamun, Ariful Islam, Tuhin Kanti Das, Surjo Polas, Noor-I-Naznin, Oniruddho Ratan
Bangladesh/France/Norway
2021
In Bengali with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
Sasha Waters' documentary takes us through the life of America's best-selling late twentieth century poet, a private woman who shared her innermost thoughts and made them indispensable.
Election
Tracy Flick (Reece Witherspoon) is running for Student President, but Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) has other ideas... This remarkably sour millennial comedy from Alexander Payne (The Holdovers; Sideways; The Descendents) hits twice as hard today.
Memory of Princess Mumbi
In 2093, a filmmaker arrives in the African village of Umata, where he meets Princess Mumbi, a woman torn between love, legacy, and the future of storytelling. It's a fabulous genre-blending fable about memory, invention and cinematic resistance.
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai
Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is an assassin, but he's also an existential loner who adheres to his personal code. Despite the thriller trappings, this is really a lampoon of that genre, and a melancholy reverie for the cultural melting pot we call home.
The Straight Story
David Lynch goes a different direction in this linear Midwestern about a septuagenarian (Richard Farnsworth) who drives nearly 400km on a lawnmower to visit his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton).
Franz
Veteran Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland takes the bull by the horns to craft a Kafka biopic that's Kafkaesque and then some, artfully layering scenes from Kafka's life and works along with ironic present-day footage for a truly surreal counterpoint.
Credits
Producer
Sara Afreen
Screenwriter
Kamar Ahmad Simon
Cinematography
Kamar Ahmad Simon
Editor
Saikat Sekhareswar Ray
Original Music
Saikat Sekhareswar Ray
Director
Photo by Saiful Islam Soikat
Kamar Ahmad Simon
Kamar Ahmad Simon’s debut Are You Listening! (2012) won the Grand Prix in Cinéma du Réel in Paris and the Golden Conch at the Mumbai International Film Festival. His script for Day After… was awarded at Locarno Film Festival’s Open Doors Hub and won the Arte International Open Doors Prize in 2016. The Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland have screened his work. Kamar has been a jury member in the Sydney Film Festival.
Filmography: Are You Listening! (2012); Neel Mukut (2021)