On a Saturday evening Kolkata-based filmmaker Sourav Sarangi, 45, received a panicky phone call from his wife to organise a hospital bed for an eight-month-old boy with a serious head injury. This child went on to become a subject of a heartrending documentary that’s captured the imagination of the world. Sarangi’s Bilal is a film shot entirely in a tiny, dank room in Kolkata’s Taltala, a working class neighbourhood where Bilal lives with his blind parents.

“The boy’s life fascinated me. He knows how to communicate with his parents through sound and touch. Also he is never aimless. Either he’s guiding his blind parents through the traffic or getting into mischief with his brother Hamza,” says Sarangi who is an FTII alumnus and has been making documentaries for 20 years. The 88-minute film has been made after editing 160 hours of footage. “The film is not issue-based and I am not trying to resolve a problem. I have just observed Bilal closely,” says Sarangi who also adds that this type of story comes with its own set of challenges, namely, narrating it without any clearly defined set of ideas and giving a structure to the humdrum moments of life.

“There are moments which are a little violent, mostly to do with the kind of society Bilal lives in. He’s beaten up by the neighbourhood kids and by his parents — there are conflicting feelings, though I wanted to protect him I kept filming,” says Sarangi who initially funded the film himself but eventually convinced the Government of Finland to fund the film.

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