Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s epic poem Meghnad Badh Kabya to make its cinematic debut at Rotterdam

It took seven years, 12 locations across India, and the commitment of a dedicated cast and crew to bring Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghnad Badh Kabya to the screen for the first time. The film, The Killing of Meghnad, marks the long-standing collaboration between director Ashish Avikunthak and associate director Sagnik Mukherjee, whose journey began in 2017.

“Kalkimanthankatha was my first film with Ashish,” Sagnik recalls. “Since then, we have been working together on multiple projects. Seven years ago, we decided to adapt Meghnad Badh Kabya and initially approached Goutam Halder for the titular role, given his well-known solo stage adaptation. He performs the entire epic himself, and we thought of transforming that into a cinematic experience. He declined, and that is when we decided to make the film ourselves.”

The poem itself is over 150 years old and had never been adapted for cinema. “I looked - both in Bengali and other languages, and realised no one had attempted it before,” Sagnik adds. “There is a South Indian film called Meghnad Badh featuring NTR, but it has nothing to do with Dutt’s poem.” Production officially began in 2017, and after years of meticulous planning and shooting, filming wrapped in 2024, with post-production completed in 2025, paving the way for its festival debut this year at Rotterdam.

The team travelled across India, from the expansive salt marshes of Kutch to the dense forests of Jim Corbett, from the high altitudes of Ladakh to the seaside pilgrimage town of Puri. “We needed landscapes that retained a sense of primal civilisation,” Sagnik explains. “Tourist areas were unsuitable, so location was crucial to conveying the scale of time and space in which this epic unfolds.” Ashish adds, “I staged the epic within India’s raw landscapes to avoid the extravagance typical of mythological cinema. The high altitudes of Ladakh, the deserts of Kutch, and the dense forests of Jim Corbett are not merely backdrops - they are elemental, metaphysical spaces that shape the story itself.”

Prasenjit Bardhan, in his final film, plays Meghnad. The cast also includes Anujoy Chattopadhyay, Deepak Halder, Riddhibesh Bhattacharya, Sraman Chatterjee, Arkoja Acharyya, Sukanto Chatterjee and Sudip Chakraborty in pivotal roles.

Adapting nine cantos into a 93-minute narrative required careful selection and research. “We concentrated on the exchanges and dialogues, such as Meghnad with Ravan or Sita with Sarama, and not the ornamentation or description,” Sagnik says. “It took six to seven months just to decide what to include and what to leave out. The focus was always on dialogue and the dramatic encounters at the heart of the poem.” Ashish emphasises that while the screenplay is contemporary, the poem itself remains central. “From a dialogue standpoint, we have not moved a bit from what Michael wrote. The text is radical, and I wanted the film to confront its complexity directly.”

With the trailer already attracting over 50,000 views in a week, both Ashish and Sagnik hope audiences will finally experience a cinematic version of this epic, one that balances faithful adaptation with a fresh, modern perspective. The film will premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival on January 30.

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