Miss Lovely Niharika Singh makes Tolly debut

After a year and a half, when Bappaditya Bandopadhyay wielded the megaphone one more time, it was like starting all over again.
The director of Houseful, Elar Char Adhyay and Kagojer Bou among others, has completed shooting his next ��� Sohra. Starring in the lead is 'Miss Lovely' Niharika Singh. This marks the actress's debut in a Bengali film.
Sohra (Cherrapunjee), where the film has been shot, itself plays a major role in the movie.Says the director, ���A girl (Niharika) makes a trip to Sohra to bury old memories. Instead, she comes face to face with her past. Are the events that happen for real or are they part of her fertile imagination? It's a father-daughter relationship story; the father is played by Barun Chanda."
The film stars actors from Khasi and Assamese film industries. The cast comprises Prateik Sen, Raj Banerjee, Khasi actor Merlvin J Mukhim, whose film Rii won the National Award last year, and Assamese actors Nishita Goswami and Paul Phukon. Dialogues are in three languages ��� Bangla, Assamese and Khasi.
The story, says the director, originated from a couple of lines from a poem by Albanian author and poet Ismail Kadare ��� 'The memory of you dies in me day by day/ Now, I am looking everywhere/ For a place to drop you...' It also deals a lot with current politics, much like many of his other films. About his lead actress, Bappaditya says, ���I loved Miss Lovely. In fact, Ashim Ahluwalia is one of my favourite directors. Niharika, on her part, had watched Houseful and both of us wanted to work together. Sohra is cinema the way I see it. Niharika's lines are in Hindi, English and Bengali; she has picked up the latter rather well. Her favourite word is 'keno' and she would throw it at me every now and then during the shoot."

So smitten is Bappaditya with the Northeast that he is planning to shoot more films there. ���Sohra is the first of my trilogy," he adds. Ask him why the shoot was kept under wraps and the director says, ���There was a time nothing much was happening on my work front and I didn't want to make an announcement before the film finally happened. It's an indie film, put together by some of my friends and me."


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