In recent years, a number of works within Bangladesh's independent cinema have begun to move away from the conventional, story-driven structure built around cheap, middle-class hero-heroine narratives, and have instead started searching for a new cinematic language. These films are less interested in entertaining audiences than in drawing them into an experience. They take the viewer on a long journey in which the viewer sees their own life, their own social order, and everything unfolding around them. The narrative in these films is not linear; rather, it is a process of looking anew at time, space, silence, nature, and the relationships between people. These films do not merely break with conventional cinematic form — they hurl a challenge at the state itself. In such films we see the lives and struggles of marginalized people, stories that otherwise remain forever hidden. Against the cheap, song-and-dance, middle-class-hero-driven storytelling that has come to dominate Bengali cinema, these films challenge that very cheapness of language. Delupi is an important example of this.
(Delupi's director Touqir Islam.I don't want to write anything about Delupi's director, Touqir Islam, or his team. I want to go straight into discussing the film)
Delupi is not simply a story of rural Bangladesh; it is not merely the story of the Delupi union. It is a cinematic embodiment of peripheral reality, in which environment, landscape, and human existence merge into a single aesthetic experience. This work brings the possibilities of Bangladesh's experimental cinematic language freshly to the fore. Delupi speaks of a flood-ravaged, marginal region — of people's struggle to survive, their love, the political reality built around them, the fight for a durable embankment, and the dirty political games surrounding it, all of which throw down a challenge to Bangladesh's structures of power and to conventional politics. It points a finger straight at this filthy political reality. A government falls, and a new government arrives — yet we see that even with the new government, there is no liberation. There is no end to the exploitation of the marginalized; no change comes to their lives. Delupi points directly at the ongoing class struggle. At the same time, it shows the impulsiveness of Gen Z, and, alongside it, the courage to raise one's head and protest. Delupi takes the audience on a journey with these people, planting thought in the viewer's mind — a thought that teaches them to question the state system.
Conventional realism usually presents society from a central vantage point. But the reality that Delupi holds is not that of the state, the city, or the centers of power; rather, it is the river, the char, the village, and the everyday life of marginal people — everything that happens within their lives. Take, for instance, the film's Chairman Zakir, who rises to power after a government falls, and then behaves exactly like the chairman before him. Here the director shows, in very clear terms, that the fall of a government or an individual changes nothing — the system itself is the real problem. Another character in the film, Mihir, who is a voice of protest against all this, is presented as a symbol of the new generation, a glimmer of hope. The film also shows how the state system continually assaults culture itself, so that no one is left with the capacity to think. It shows how NGOs run their business by capitalizing on these marginalized people. With a delicate hand, the director has framed the reality of Bangladesh's marginal people — where the longing to survive exists alongside joy, sorrow, love, struggle, poverty, and caste, all at once. The director shows how a young man gets a job in Bangladesh, how a traveling folk performer is devalued, how a chairman steals, how love is trapped in the dock of judgment because of class. The very struggle to survive becomes the director's frame.
Ritwik Ghatak once said that with every moment he would hammer home to the audience that what they were seeing was not an imaginary tale, that he had not come to offer cheap pleasure — that with every moment he would remind them that what they were watching, though a constructed fiction, carried within it a thesis that was entirely true, and that he would alienate the audience at every turn precisely to draw their attention to that truth. Director Touqir Islam dismantles this very approach. Through his film, he seems to say: I will jolt you at every moment to make you understand that this is not an imaginary story, that I have not come to give you cheap pleasure. At every moment I will hammer into you that what you are watching is reality — your reality and mine. Touqir Islam masterfully breaks down the approach of fictional storytelling and brings it into reality.
And this realism is not a social documentary; it is, instead, a realism of feeling — of the most delicate, minute sensations. Here, nature, water, mud, restlessness, and the waiting for better days are all as important to understanding human life as anything else. As a result, the film constructs a "Peripheral Realism," in which the periphery is not merely geographical but also political, economic, and cultural. And this realism does not call on the audience to feel sympathy for its characters; rather, it forces them to inhabit the experience of marginal life itself — forces them to think. The entire film brings before them an entire state, the very one in which we — you and I — live.
Another vital dimension of the film is its use of nature. The river, the sky, the wind, the mud, the rain — none of these remain mere elements. They become the film's active language, its living characters. Here, the environment does not stand opposed to human beings; it coexists with them. Human decisions, memories, fears, and futures are all bound up with the environment. As a result, nature becomes a living character within the film. This ecological aesthetic urges the audience to think of the environment not merely as a resource, but as a living existence in its own right.
Most importantly, Delupi dismantles the industrial culture of Bengali cinema. It breaks down the very idea that filmmaking requires massive cameras, razor-sharp technical setups, and vast amounts of money. Delupi was shot with an extremely minimal setup — a direct challenge to the cinema-related syndicates. And it forces one to think: filmmaking does not require very much at all; what it requires is thought, dedication, and honesty toward the craft.
Delupi is not a film of conventional dramatic conflict or fast-paced editing. Instead, through long takes, slow pacing, silence, and an observational camera language, it creates an altogether different cinematic experience. The director himself was the cinematographer, and he experimented with his camera like a child at play. The film has no conventional framing, and lens changes are minimal. He has folded not just the characters but the surrounding elements into the frame in such a way that the frame itself comes alive. Its vast wide shots break apart the established cinematographic language of Bengali film. Wide, mid, close — Touqir Islam dismantles this conventional approach of Bengali cinema. He brings a new kind of cinematographic approach in which it scarcely feels like cinema at all — as though everything unfolding in the frame is truly, actually happening. Touqir's approach confronts Bengali cinematography with an entirely new language.Moreover, none of Delupi's actors are professional performers; for most, this is their first time in front of a camera. They are residents of the village of Delupi itself. The challenge Touqir Islam undertook in working with the residents of that village has given birth to a new trend in Bengali cinema. In hostile weather, in water up to their necks, amid flooding on every side, a small crew ran about with their cameras. The dedication Touqir's team brought to making this film deserves recognition and praise. Such struggle is exceedingly rare in Bengali cinema.
In Delupi, the flow of time matters as much as, if not more than, the story itself. The audience does not merely follow events — they pass through that time themselves. Silence here is not a substitute for dialogue; it is a distinct language of its own. In many moments, it is the very absence of sound that generates the most powerful meaning. The audience is drawn into a kind of trance — as though everything were happening right before them, and at the same time, a kind of helplessness sets in, the sense that they could do nothing about it. In Delupi, Touqir manages to carry the audience into the Delupi union itself; viewers come to feel as though they, too, are residents of that very village — that everything is unfolding before their own eyes, that what appears on screen is somehow deeply, intimately familiar to everyone.
For a long time, Bangladesh's independent cinema was, first and foremost, cheaply commercial; the few exceptional films that existed still leaned heavily on social realism and political statement. Delupi represents a new aesthetic form within that exceptional current. In this film, politics is not present as direct sloganeering. Rather, politics is expressed through space, the body, labor, environment, and everyday life. Delupi is a thoroughly political film — one that forces the audience to think, to analyze anew, that hammers toward political consciousness.
Delupi has opened a door to new possibilities within Bangladesh's independent cinema. It proves, unmistakably, that experimental cinema is not solely the province of European or foreign traditions — that a distinct cinematic language can also be born from Bangladesh's own geography, environment, and the lives of its marginal people. And giving birth to precisely that should be the central task of the country's filmmakers. Delupi throws down a challenge, everywhere at once.Through the fusion of "Peripheral Realism" and "Ecological Aesthetics," Delupi constructs an aesthetic in which nature, time, silence, and human coexistence themselves become the film's primary language. In that sense, Delupi is not merely a film — it is a promising document opening a new horizon in Bangladesh's independent and experimental filmmaking.
Selim Khan
Filmmaker & Writer.