Director’s Statement

I have a passion for photography and film making. I wanted to make a film for a long time, but due to either not finding the right story or lack of confidence in being able to organize funding and complete a film, it didn’t materialize. Then in 2017, I joined a workshop on Documentary film making and realised that I can make a documentary. After some soul searching regarding the topic of my first documentary, while I was attending the 80th birthday celebration of Sayeeda Khanum, I found my topic—Sayeeda Khanum, the pioneer female photographer of Bangladesh. 
In this documentary, I wanted to bring out Sayeeda Khanum’s determination, progressive thinking, and her amazing ability to form close relationship with everyone, including many legendary artists and personalities. When I started this documentary, she was eighty years old and she already had hearing difficulties and needed supports in movement, so I wanted to capture her stories in her words as much as possible. In addition, I also wanted viewers to know that she was not only the pioneer female photographer of Bangladesh, but she was also a remarkable photographer of her time, so I included interviews of one internationally acclaimed Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam and a well-known Photojournalist of Bangladesh Pavel Rahman to talk about her photographs. 
This documentary won the Special Festival Mention award in the 8th Kolkata Shorts International Film Festival and it was officially selected and screened at a number of international film festivals. 
Sadly, Sayeeda Khanum took her last breath and left us on 18 August 2020. After her demise in December 2020, I decided to re-edit this documentary to incorporate her complete life. While re-editing, I changed the structure of the documentary a bit; incorporated new footages and increased the length, from around 38 minutes to around 45 minutes. I also made colour and sound corrections again. The new version is much different from the first version, it presents more insight on her becoming a photographer and her personality.

Note: How I made this documentary

On the first day of shooting, I forgot to mention to the cameraman that I am going to shoot indoor, he was a young cameraman and he didn’t bring any light. As a result, we had to go again and re-shoot most of the segments. In spite of lack of light, I decided to use some of the footages from day 1 because of contents, so I had to really work hard to correct the colour of those shots during post-production.

Before this documentary I made small videos, which I edited by hiring professional editors, but I was never truly satisfied with their work. Also, I did not have the money to hire a very good editor. So, when I decided to make this documentary, I also decided that I would learn editing and do it myself. After finishing shooting, I enrolled to a three-month course on Video Editing and Post-production and edited the documentary myself. To improve my editing and colour grading further I also enrolled to another course in Udemy.

I interviewed Sayeeda Khanum at her flat, which was beside a busy road, so there was too much noise. During the post-production, I was not fully satisfied with the sound corrections, so I attended a workshop on Sound and also watched YouTube videos to learn more about sound corrections and made further improvements. To use as a background music, I decided to use the tune of a Tagore song, ‘Jhara, jhara dadal diney…’ Sayeed Khanum’s favourite song.  Since, it was an independent film with no budget, so I requested my cousin Muntazar Monsur to compose the background score.  He and his wife, Rozalynne Samira, together made the background score of my film.  Done a great job!

This is my first documentary, so new ideas kept coming and I kept adding those as inserts. During post-production I went to Kolkata on a personal visit and there I took images of the Victoria Memorial and used those as inserts. At the time of shooting Sayeeda Khanum was 80 years old, she could not provide any published version of her works and both Begum and Chitrali where she worked were no longer in operation. So, I had to search really hard and finally found some of her works from Sufia Kamal Public Library, Bangladesh Film Archive and a private collector, Mr. Enayet Kabir. I tried my best to bring all aspects of her life in this documentary.