Shey: The Conversation

Directed by Shameem Akhtar, Tareque Masud

A man and a woman meet after a long unexplained separation. Gradually over the course of a strained and oblique conversation, the nature of their shared past is revealed. This film grew out of a casual conversation between feminist writer and filmmaker Shameem Akhter and Masud. When Shameem mentioned the plot of a feminist short story she had written, Masud immediately suggested it be made into a short film. Shameem herself plays the female role, while noted actor Pijush Bandhapadhyay plays the mysterious male visitor who turns up at her door. The theme of an independent working woman, supporting a family household, was new to Bangladesh cinema in the early 1990s. This reflected the changing face of a rapidly urbanizing society with a growing population of educated wage- earning women, and in some ways paralleled the developments of Satyajit Ray’s 1963 classic Mahanagar. In this sense Se was a pioneering work for Bangladesh in expressing the new feminist ethos of the 1990s generation.