Anjan Dutta to adapt Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’

There is good news for lovers of Bengali cinema. Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider is not the last you have seen of an Indian adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as Anjan Dutta, the celebrated Bengali director-actor-singer, will take up the tragic hero as the subject of his forthcoming film. “I should be starting work in a few months, it’s still in the blueprint stages,” Dutta said on the sidelines of Xavotsav 2015, an annual cultural evening of the Dubai chapter of the alumni of St Xaviers College, Kolkata, late on Friday evening.

It was a lively meet-and-greet session with Dutta, who has made films such as The Bong Connection, a landmark film that was a huge hit among the Bengali diaspora, rock musicals Madly Bengali, Ranjana Ami Ar Ashbona and a trilogy on Byomkesh Bakshi, the all-time popular fictional sleuth created by novelist Saradindu Bandopadhyay.

In an interactive talk show themed “Paradigm shift in Bengali cinema since the 1960s” later, Dutta rued the lack of a pan-Indian and global distribution system to spread new-wave Bengali cinema. “I started a trend with The Bong Connection in 2004 to bring the Multiplex crowd into Bengali cinema. There are a number of gifted filmmakers in our industry today like Srijit Mukherjee, Kaushik Ganguly, Kamaleshwar Mukherjee and Mainak Bowmick, who are delivering content which are urban and of high quality. The problem is we can’t organise release of these films on a regular basis even in other metro cities like New Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore,” Dutta said.