Before I Forget You: Tales of resilience from young minds

Sourya Dipta Ghosh is a young, bright-eyed filmmaker, quite literally travelling with his first feature film Before I Forget You. Nervous and very polite, Sourya Dipta talked to The Statesman about his journey as a filmmaker, a student of cinema, and his prized creation. He started with, “I have done my post-graduate on film studies from Jadavpur University.

I come from a family where cinema, and filmmaking are jobs done by the more privileged class. When we are young, we all think that we will change the world, we will have earth shattering ideas. Hence, I wanted to try out if I could really make a film by ourselves. The entire budget of the film was Rs 80,000. I collected that money by doing various writing jobs. You know how it goes. At that point of time, I had no idea how to make a film. It was supposed to be a two-three-month project at most, but it went on to become a three-year journey.” Before I Forget You is a road trip film, historicizing the journey of a group of friends, from the time they were seventeen to the late twenties, in the span of two days, without the use of any flashbacks.

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continues, “When the film was done, I had no idea where to show it. But the only thing I had as my arsenal was that I am a proper cinephile. But I had no idea how to get into the bigger festivals. You need to have a lot of potential contacts to get into the festivals that I know of internationally. At that point of time, it had become three years, a lot of people had come and gone, and the film had metamorphosed from an idea over a cup of tea to a full length feature. I had also run out of steam, because I had to run around to the bigger names of the industry and request them to edit the film and works like that.

I just sent out emails to a lot of international festivals about who I was and if they could give me a chance.” The film has gone on to win six best feature documentaries internationally. Come on, Doc is a film festival focusing on first time documentary makers, and they have a prize money of 800 Euros. Sourya said, “It was more than the whole budget of the film, and we won it.” More than the money Sourya states, “It was about someone outside acknowledging the work we did for such a long time.” The film is also currently being streamed on Japanese OTT platforms. Right now Sourya Dipta has a page on the internet to crowd fund his film. “I was doing English Graduation.

I wanted to be a journalist desperately. An acquaintance of mine told me to give the exam for film studies, and i very stupidly said what will come of it? It was accidental. Then I wrote the film. It’s a chronicle, it’s about three friends, the cars on the road take the shape of houses, and it is about journeys. Somehow, it had gained a lot of momentum. About two months back, we lost the main financier of the film. He backed out, and the film fell onto its face. I felt a little defeated, but I have hope. The film has gathered love, and I hope it continues.” Sourya ends on, “Given the dire financial situation of the family, I really should be getting a job, maybe these are my last blows in the nothingness before accepting that some dreams are always too far from us. I am just trying to do every last thing to not give up on this.”