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“THE BENGALI DETECTIVE | director, Philip Cox
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV]
Making The Bengali Detective was an incredibly intense period of filmmaking. I and my small team had no idea where our detective and his investigations would lead us. Each client brought their own revelations and twisting storyline. We had a central character die during the production, a subject who discovered her husband was sleeping with her brother’s wife. There was a poor grieving mother who then became a suspect in a triple murder case. And our hero detective turned up one day to greet us in a silver-and-gold glitter costume in order to play out his alter ego. After a few months we got used to “The Calcutta Factor”: each day we knew was going to be very different than what we planned for. But that was the beauty of it — only documentary can respond to such surprises and revelations to incorporate them all into a film that captures a patchwork of extraordinary lives unfolding in one of the world’s great metropolises.
