Bengali cinema’s successful on-screen couple, Prosenjit Chatterjee and Rituparna Sengupta, will reunite after 14 years with Prakton, to be produced by the makers of Tanu Weds Manu Returns.
The film will mark the debut of production house Eros International in the Bengali film industry.
Prakton will be directed by Nandita Roy and Shiboprosad Mukhopadhyay.
“We want to open our market. Tanu Weds Manu was our home production. Now we would love to be associated with Bengali cinema, which boasts of one of the finest talents among directors and technicians,” Nanda Ahuja, from Eros International, said.
“With the casting of Prosenjit Chatterjee and Rituparna Sengupta, two icons in Bengali film industry by one of the most popular Bengali director-duo Nandita Roy-Shiboprosad Mukhopadhyay, we mark our beginning as producers here. We are super excited,” she said.
The company will join up with Windows Production of the directors, who have delivered string of blockbusters including Ichhe to the recent Belaseshe, the last one being distributed countrywide in 25 theatres by Eros with English sub-titles.
“While Hindi will remain our core area, we are coming into other regional films including Marathi cinema. We have many plans which will be unveiled later on,” a top official said.
Chatterjee, 52, who has done more than 50 films with Sengupta, said: “Our last project was Jamaibabu Zindabad in 2001. And while we had delivered the maximum number of masala hits as hero-heroines over the years, both of us have evolved as actors.
“Now, I had an agreement with Sibu [as Shiboprosad is fondly called] that I would act in his film and I thought he and Nandita Roy are one of the most bankable directors in Bengali film industry now, who can cast the two of us,” he said.
Sengupta, 43, hopes history will be created with the film. “It’s not important why we did not act together in so many years,” she said.
Since 2003, several Tollywood directors attempted to bring the ‘hit jodi’ together without success.
Mukhopadhyay said he could not imagine the film without the two stars.
“I have settled for Prosenjit-Rituparna as the principal cast, since without them this film won’t be possible. It will bear our stamp of clean family entertainer with emotional drama. It will be a universal love story,” he said.
