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Debutant filmmaker Sandeep Kumar Paul’s About an Intimate Matter (Bengali title: Ekanto Byaktigoto Bishoy) is will have its world premiere at the 31st Busan International Film Festival.
The Bengali-language feature is premiering today, October 8, at LOTTE CINEMA Centum City 3 as part of Busan's A Window on Asian Cinema section. The section showcases distinctive contemporary films and emerging voices from across Asia.
About an Intimate Matter is a 97-minute queer psychological drama that centers on high-school science teacher Swarna, and her partner Driti. When they move to a quaint suburban town for respite and to begin anew, their stability is shaken when a student discovers Swarna's intimate photographs on social media and circulates them among his classmates.
The gossip soon entails a form of institutional punishment as Swarna's authority as a teacher is compromised with the new gaze she is greeted with from her students. Her colleagues and administrators also blur the lines between her private life and professional offense. As the situation deepens and Swarna finds her career and relationship under pressure, she must decide to what length she is willing to go to reclaim her autonomy.
To Paul, the film came from "years of listening, observing and trying to understand how profession, class and social expectation enter our most private relationships."
"I did not want to look at queer lives from the outside or treat them as exceptional. I wanted Swarna and Driti to have the same contradictions, desires, vulnerabilities and dignity as anyone else. I am grateful that this intimate story, rooted in West Bengal, will begin its journey with an international audience," he says.
Producer and co-founder of Awedacious Originals, Apoorva Bakshi, expresses that the film has "remarkable restraint," in that "it never announces its politics, but allows them to emerge through its characters, their relationships and the world they inhabit."
About an Intimate Matter was shot entirely in West Bengal over a span of 12 days. It is produced by International Emmy-winning producer Bakshi and Monisha Thyagarajan of Awedacious Originals, Abid Aziz Merchant and Neeraj Churi of Lotus Visual Productions, bringing independent producing partners across India, United States and the United Kingdom.