Under Construction

Female filmmakers from Bangladesh are very rare, especially if dealing with feminism and we are very excited to present Rubaiyat Hossain at this year’s festival. Her critically acclaimed debut Meherjaan(2011) dealt with political and cultural wrath in Bangladesh and was appreciated for its anti war narrative, and its critic of masculine nationalism from a feminine point of view. In her second feature film, Under Construction, Hossain takes on the formation of Bengali modernity and its correlation with female sexuality.

Under Construction(2015) is about a modern Muslim woman struggling to find herself in the sprawl of urban Bangladesh, where middle class actress Roya reconstructs a famous and politically minded play of Rabindranath Tagore for modern times, reclaiming her agency in the process.

About the director

Rubaiyat Hossain is one of Bangladesh’s handful of female filmmakers, currently based in Dhaka and New York, attending Cinema Studies at Tisch School of Arts. Rubaiyat has a Bachelor’s degree in Women Studies from Smith College, USA and a Master’s degree in South Asian Studies from University of Pennsylvania. She has also worked for women’s rights NGOs and was the assistant coordinator for the first international workshop of Sexuality and Rights organized by BRAC School of Public Health in 2007.

Director’s Statement

“In claiming her body-mind-soul how does a woman’s introspective journey gets entangled with the battle on the outside in a world of post-colonial reality where political violence, religious extremism, sweatshop labors, and impunity largely paint the terrain?

‘Womanhood’ authored by patriarchy sustains a power-pleasure-desire lattice by generating, sustaining and reproducing cultural myths about female sexuality. ‘Womanhood’ authored by women, female sexuality comprehended and utilized for the purpose of woman’s subject formation is still largely a process ‘under construction.’

In ‘Under Construction,’ a woman who has not yet been born into subjectivity seeks to unsettle the iconic image of the archetypical Bengali woman—‘Nandini,’ the ultimate depiction of feminine spirit represented as the heroine of Rabindranath Tagore’s last play ‘Rakta Karabi’ or ‘The Red Oleanders.’”