Filmmaker Adityavikram Sengupta speaks about his debut 'Asha Jaoar Majhe'

In 2009, when recession hit the country and many professionals struggled to keep their jobs, adman Adityavikram Sengupta and his wife saw many of their friends scrambling to stay afloat. "Many were let of without a reason, or worse, a severance pay. It was not the best of times," remembers Sengupta.The protagonists of his debut feature Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love), which is headed to the 71st Venice International Film Festival starting next week, are entangled in a similar mess. Struggling to make ends meet in grubby lanes of north Kolkata amid the spiralling recession, they wait silently in hope of better days to come."We were not looking to make a movie on recession, but in a way wanted to make something of our own, keeping the recession in context," said Sengupta. "My characters, too, are part of a constant struggle to save jobs."Starring Ritwick Chakraborty and Basabdutta Chatterjee, the Bengali film was produced by Sengupta with Sanjay Shah of Salaam Cinema, and wife Jonaki Bhattacharya. The 84-minute 'silent film' will be shown in Venice Days, an autonomous section of the festival that will be held between August 27 and September 6, and is in the running for three titles – the Venice Days Jury award, Venice Days Public award and the Luigi de Laurentiis, or Lion of the Future award.The dialogue-less movie, which looks at the cycle of work and domestic routine of the protagonists, with "long stretches of waiting in the silence of an empty house", will be the first Bengali film in a decade to head to Venice. The last was Goutam Ghose's Abar Aranye in 2003. Part of the movie was shot by Mahindra Shetty, who has worked on Udaan and Lootera, and the rest by Sengupta.Sengupta says he did not feel the need for dialogues. "There are ambient sounds in the movie. But, frankly, there was no situation in the movie that demanded a dialogue," he said. "Like in (Kamal Haasan-starrer) Pushpak, which was a window-to-window love story, Labour of Love, too, did not need any dialogues."Labour of Love, he says, is essentially about love but "expressed in a somewhat new way. It is a movie that will appeal to people across ages".Sengupta, who studied graphic design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, is now developing another project – a spiritual drama set in rural Bengal.