Poran Jai Joliya Re sure had it’s moments under and away from the sun here, but it failed to blaze a trail to far off Boston where graduate school student Gourab De has just finished watching Antaheen on his laptop. “We usually get to see all Hindi films at theatres around here, but we usually watch Bengali films on DVD. I am not quite sure of the potboilers, but it would be nice if we could see them on big screen too,” says De. While a Yash Raj is a distant dream for the Bengali film industry, producer Arijit Dutta is trying his best to make Bengali films available in the West more easily than before. “Good films, commercial or what you call art house, will find an audience anywhere in the world. But people have to be made aware of their presence and an initiative has to be taken to take films outside. Apart from the probasi Bengalis, people are not aware of contemporary Bengali cinema,” says filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta, whose films have travelled to several international film festivals.

Dutta arranged the screening of Dev-Shrabanti-starrer Dujone in San Francisco and Washington this Puja. “We can’t start screening Bengali films in the USA or UK overnight. First we have to make DVDs and CDs of films available in markets easily. We have to take it forward from there,” says Dutta. Filmmaker Goutam Ghose, whose films have travelled to several film festivals across the world agrees. “People don’t invest much in the DVD mastering of Bengali films. Hence, quality suffers and people get to see very bad prints. The younger people have no patience for such nuisance,” he explains.

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