Anyone with even a rudimentary acquaintance with the history of Bangladeshi cinema knows that it is, in reality, a Dhaka-centric history. From the domestic milieu of the Nawabs and feudal elites of early Dhaka, transitioning from the silent era to the talkies, or spanning several decades of cinematic journey from the British Empire through East Pakistan into Bangladesh—virtually its entire trajectory, robust or fragile, has revolved intensely around Dhaka. Yet Tauquir and his team, through the making of the film ‘Delupi’ (2025), refused to become part of this encroaching continuum of Bengali cinematic history. Bringing their distinctive craft along with a cast of amateur actors from Khulna, this filmmaking collective from Rajshahi presented audiences with the story of thirteen villages from the Deluti Union of that region.
Consequently, the release of ‘Delupi’ by ‘Tauquir and Team’ is not merely a tale of rural longing for national transformation from Bengal’s margins; rather, its casting, stylistic craft, distribution, and audience engagement collectively articulate a watershed moment in the nation's cinematic history. The film premiered at Liberty Cinema Hall in Khulna, before expanding to Dhaka, Rajshahi, and across the country. It should be noted that the film’s premiere was organized for the actual protagonists of the story—the inhabitants of the thirteen villages of Deluti Union in Khulna—by converting a local school into a screening auditorium. Nearly all these cinematic developments unfolding outside Dhaka are unprecedented in Bangladeshi cinema. It is evident that ‘Delupi’ stands at a considerable remove from Dhaka’s cinephiles, major financing corporations, and Dhaka-centric bourgeois audiences. And it is precisely here that ‘Delupi’, directed by Tauquir and his team, bears witness to a paradigm shift in the history of vernacular cinema. One might add that the core intent behind this artistic endeavor was never commerce, but a profound yearning to commune with the common masses.
The Mass Uprising of '24 in Bangladesh. The 5th of August 2024 marked the collapse of a brutal and entrenched fascist regime, accompanied by the shameless flight of the former head of state, abandoning both country and party workers. The entire nation was ecstatic with the joy born of this fall and the departure of the autocrat. Yet right on its heels, by mid-August, catastrophic floods swept across the land. It is against this backdrop and at this very juncture that the film ‘Delupi’ originates. The narrative then moves toward its finale, weaving together a tender romance alongside the villagers' collective aspiration to construct a new embankment to preserve their ancestral home. Throughout the film's opening segment, rain and floods form a dense motif. Along with them echoes the chant: "She has fled, Sabina has fled!" Needless to say, almost every contemporary viewer strongly relates to this slogan and this specific temporal moment; having actively participated in this uprising, a significant majority of the audience undoubtedly experiences the film as their own living chronicle.
Caption: A scene from the film ‘Delupi’
The narrative then progresses by picking up the threads immediately following the 5th of August. Interestingly, it is precisely here that the form and discourse of ‘Delupi’ distinguish themselves before the audience from other films centered on the post-’24 mass uprising. While the primary focus of other films released during this period revolved around the genesis and precursor background of the July–August uprising, ‘Delupi’ instead seeks to converse and reckon with the post-uprising country, its people, and the unfulfilled desires and reality of the combatants themselves.
Caption: A scene from the film ‘Delupi’
Consequently, we witness an elaborate depiction of Chairman Jakir and the ascent of the Janata Party in the wake of the uprising. Having lived in exile for years and burdened by various criminal charges, Chairman Jakir returns to Delupi by evading the boat fare and stealing the boatman's bamboo pole. It goes without saying that the chairman’s entrance into the film makes it abundantly clear that he contributed nothing to the anti-fascist resistance beyond merely fleeing to save his own skin. Yet, in the aftermath of the shift in political power, he transforms from a submissive cat into a ferocious tiger. Along with his personal resurgence, this womanizing chairman embarks on a myriad of scams, occupations, and machinations to extort money from the villagers for the party fund. To those of us accustomed to the country’s conventional political machinery, this scene feels all too familiar. Needless to say, we have witnessed countless such incidents unfold following the uprising; as a result, the average viewer feels a strong resonance with the film’s critique.
Yet it remains undeniable that ‘Delupi’ is a tale of awakening hope. A succession of events—from the 2015 anti-VAT movement and the first phase of the quota reform movement in 2018, to the road safety movement, culminating in the mass uprising of 2024—has taught us to place political faith in this nation's youth. Interrogating the rot and corruption of conventional political parties has become second nature to today’s young men and women. The new generation views the emergence of any individual as a demigod or an overbearing icon, akin to the former regime, through a lens of profound suspicion. As a result, the tendency toward unchecked, centralized power is now being shattered to pieces. This impulse runs deep within ‘Delupi’ as well. The revolutionaries of the new generation—including Mihir (a university student directly involved in the movement)—repeatedly interrogate the fraudulent facade of Chairman Jakir. Right before everyone’s eyes, the ground on which Chairman Jakir seeks to monopolize power begins to crumble.
The core spirit of the '24 Mass Uprising lies in the decentralization of leadership. Throughout the uprising, we saw pockets of protesters acting organically under emergent, spontaneous leadership. As noted earlier, Tauquir’s filmmaking method is not divorced from this spirit. Back when making their first work, ‘Shartikap’ (2022), Tauquir and his collaborators mentioned that while crafting visuals, nearly everyone on the team handled virtually every role: the person behind the camera today became the director tomorrow, and stepped into lighting the day after. Consequently, by the end of production, the film ceased to belong to any single individual—it became everyone’s collective creation. In an era dominated by the hero-centric posturing of South Asia’s cinema icons—including Bangladesh’s Shakib Khan—even if such an indie film appears unassuming on the surface, its politics and yearning for historical transformation are rooted much deeper.
A close observation of the film reveals stylistic resonances with various revolutionary waves across world cinema. In truth, any creative work is fundamentally constructed upon the canvas of past history, intersecting with the imperatives of its own time. Thus, not only in its content but also in its cinematic form, centripetal authority and the singular deification of the director are discarded. The film becomes a collective creation of 'Tauquir and Team'. The core axis of this film is therefore improvisation. When the filmmaking crew arrived in Deluti intent on making a film, even they did not know what the narrative would ultimately become. The pioneer of such improvisation was the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, a leading figure of the French New Wave. Shattering conventional notions of studio production and scripting spontaneously on the go, he revolutionized the very concept of cinema—becoming a radical alternative.
- The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) was a revolutionary cinematic movement that emerged in France in the late 1950s, where young filmmakers—chiefly Godard, Truffaut, and others—rebelled against traditional studio cinema. Rejecting conventional studio formulas, they inaugurated a fresh and realist cinematic grammar through handheld camerawork, jump cuts, real locations, and spontaneous acting.
Caption: A poster of Godard's masterpiece 'Breathless' (1960)
Similarly, a section of today's youth aspires to emerge as an alternative. While a large segment of college and university students returned to their classrooms and educational institutions after the uprising—appearing ostensibly 'a-political' once more with regard to questions of state and power—they can still be seen raising their voices whenever a vital national issue arises. Encouragingly, over the past year, nearly every young man and woman claiming ownership of this transformation has spoken up when the moment demanded it. It is not that their interventions have always been entirely reasoned; however, navigating their own frictions with conventional morality, they have vigilantly kept their hard-won freedom under watch. Tauquir and his collective are also youths of this very generation; they too wish to keep the freedom of the post-’24 nation under their watchful gaze in their own way. Through the act of filmmaking, they seek to keep alive the probing question: are the struggles of '24 and the people's collective aspirations truly converging?
Interestingly, in the cinema of Tauquir and his team, both time and space (location) manifest as pivotal characters in the visuals. While 'time' was present as an important motif in their earlier popular productions, in the film ‘Delupi’, neither Nupur, Mihir, nor Partha serves as the primary protagonist—rather, time itself is the central protagonist. Capturing time and constructing a temporal chronicle ranks among the most crucial tasks. The filmmaker himself claims that their aim was to capture the historical moment through fiction. It was out of this very desire to capture such a moment or rupture that the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) pioneered the Kino-Eye (Cine-Eye) movement. He believed that much like the human eye, the mechanical eye of the camera can perceive everything and possesses the capacity to freeze a specific temporal moment. However, Vertov worked within a non-fictional register; that is, his domain of interest was documentary. Yet Tauquir asserts that fiction also possesses the capacity to capture the discourse of time from within that very specific moment and situated locale. And it was from this conviction that the inception of such a film took place.
Caption: Dziga Vertov
In much the same vein, the central character of their first hit series, ‘Shaaticup’, was location. It can be stated without hesitation that ‘Shaaticup’ is perhaps the first visual work in Bangladesh to engage so brilliantly with location. In the cinematography of the film ‘Dhobi Ghat’ (2011), Aamir Khan engaged a Western cinematographer who was experiencing Mumbai for the first time; the director essentially wanted to show how Mumbai appeared through the gaze of an outsider. In the case of Tauquir's ‘Shaaticup’, however, something entirely different unfolded—the rapport between the camera and the location was so seamless that at one point, the viewer felt as though they themselves were fleeing through the labyrinthine alleys of Rajshahi city. Night, dawn, twilight, midnight, across both banks of the Padma, regional vernacular, expletives—all coalesced into an electrifying atmosphere. It can undoubtedly be argued that no visual content of this nature, carrying such raw texture, had ever been released in Bangladesh prior to this. Although ‘Shaaticup’ might in certain respects evoke comparisons to ‘City of God’ (2002), the celebrated Brazilian film directed by Fernando Meirelles (b. 1955) and Kátia Lund (b. 1966), its narrative treatment remains profoundly distinct; the two visuals appear similar in certain instances merely due to the presentation of narcotics and cramped urban back-alleys. Yet it remains true that when ‘Shaaticup’ was released in 2022, creating Bangladesh's first neo-noir genre series was indeed a cause for celebration. Without risking too much hyperbole, one could say that through ‘Shaaticup’, Tauquir and his team did kindle, to some extent, an anticipation among cinephiles for Bangladesh’s own 'Tarantino'. This was due, of course, to the striking parallels ‘Shaaticup’ shared with ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994) in its use of regional dialect, profanity, and its drug-trade-centric narrative.
Caption: A scene from the movie 'City of God'
However, from Tauquir’s own account, we learn that his ‘Delupi’ is an incidental film. In other words, it represents a risky, experimental, and daring leap into filmmaking centered on a specific subject with an exceptionally modest budget. Regarding incidental cinema, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami famously observed that films must be made on such small budgets that if the experiment fails, one can crumple it up like a sheet of paper and begin anew. That very tendency is palpable within ‘Delupi’. In the words of Tauquir and his crew, they describe their filmmaking method as akin to casting a line to catch fish. Having cast the hook blindly, what will ultimately be hauled up remains entirely unknown to them. Without any certainty whether the film would materialize properly, the ‘Delupi’ crew pitched their shooting unit in a village in Pankhali (where they ended up stuck in mud up to their waists). It must be acknowledged that the cinematic finesse in Rajshahi—the sheer virtuosity that transported viewers directly into Rajshahi's narcotics den in ‘Shaaticup’—is not quite mirrored in ‘Delupi’, set against the backdrop of Khulna. Yet it cannot be dismissed that from neo-noir series to incidental cinema, from OTT platforms to movie theaters, the new generation represented by Tauquir and his peers is proving triumphant across every arena.
Caption: A scene from Quentin Tarantino's cult classic 'Pulp Fiction'
The captivating quality of visuals crafted by Tauquir and his collective lies in their attempt to capture the contemporary moment across varied dimensions. During the reign of the fascist regime, at the height of brutal police machismo, he boldly depicted scenes of police smoking cannabis inside stations and engaging in rampant corruption in ‘Shaaticup’. Likewise, he has articulated without hesitation how things in the aftermath of the '24 uprising are failing to align with our aspirations. Emerging as the central figures of ‘Delupi’ are Prashanto and his family—marginalized members of the minority Hindu community involved with traditional Bangladeshi jatra-pala—who, under the previous regime, surrendered their last bit of land to the then-incumbent Chairman Tapon in exchange for securing a job for their only son, Partha. That assurance has now vanished entirely, and labeled as an associate of Chairman Tapon, Chairman Jakir now seeks to corner him as well. Alongside this unfolds the romance and wedding narrative between Partha and Nupur, a girl from an affluent family. Yet binding all these threads together, the overarching narrative progresses around the construction of a permanent embankment for Deluti Union. On one hand, Chairman Jakir’s sordid politics surrounding the embankment construction, and on the other, the enduring resistance mounted by Generation Z, anchors us directly along the contours of our contemporary reality. The film's conclusion is undeniably poignant, mirroring the very yearning we held. Under Mihir’s leadership, the youth of Gen Z, the villagers, and Chairman Jakir unite to form a human chain addressed to the government—an evocative emblem of awakened hope. In tandem, audiences watched the theatrical performance of Raghab Banger Jatra-pala with rapt fascination. Furthermore, pulling off a feature film of this scale with an entirely amateur ensemble cast (with the sole exception of Md. Jakir Hossain portraying Chairman Jakir, everyone else was an amateur) is no minor feat. In ‘Sinpaat’ (2024), released on OTT prior to ‘Delupi’, the director had even cast a real-life robber in the role of a drug dealer. He delivered a stellar performance; however, on the day of ‘Sinpaat’’s premiere, it was discovered that he was back in prison custody and could not attend the event. For those who experiment with cinematic craft in such a radical fashion, there remains little doubt that their stories will resonate deeply with audiences and the spirit of the times.
Caption: Tauquir and Team
Finally, I would like to note that the solitary presence of Mohammad Tauquir Islam across various talk shows and cinematic dialogues felt somewhat discordant with the core spirit of their cinema. Given that the filmmakers sought to present themselves as a collective in both content and craft, the collective presence of a substantial part of the team in public forums and promotional campaigns would undoubtedly have inspired greater hope within us. Yet it remains undeniable that people will certainly remember ‘Delupi’ as an artistic endeavor embodying an honest post-uprising political discourse. Cinephiles of this country were not born with the privilege of witnessing or portraying their own era from a 'frog's-eye view'. In that respect, the ‘Delupi’ of Tauquir and his team undoubtedly captures a fragment of Bangladesh on celluloid, transcending 2025 and the immediate moment; and in doing so, it binds us too within the frame of time. And that is no small achievement!
About the Author: Monira Sharmin. Educator, film researcher, and critic. Email: pritu.ru@gmail.com
Delupi: A Chronicling of the Times upon the Canvas of Time