Forty Students Fund a Film From Pocket Money and Tuition Earnings as 'Onnopata' Opens in 10 Cinemas

Forty young people from different universities have done something full of promise: they have made a film financed from their own pocket money and tuition earnings. The film is called “Onnopata.”

It was released on Friday, even as Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology (CUET) was in the grip of an anti-vice-chancellor movement and a complete shutdown. The film's central subject is the university admission battle — a struggle familiar to hundreds of thousands of students in this country.

In its first phase, the film will screen in 10 cinemas across the country, including in Dhaka and Chattogram. For a film made with students' own savings, reaching cinema halls at all is being seen as a major achievement.

Many say the young makers deserve praise for choosing creativity over the violence, extortion, mugging and mob culture that mark these unsettled times, nurturing their own creative instincts instead to make a film. It is being discussed as a rare achievement against the current.

Culture, it is argued, leads people towards a more refined and aesthetic life. The idea of expressing themselves through cultural practice may draw many more young people towards creativity, observers hope. If students at institutions across the country express their intellect and creativity, the positive effect will be felt in society, they believe.

Through making this film, the young team has shown that staying on a positive path helps a generation express itself, keeps people determined to create even amid adversity, and opens a possibility of seeing society in a new way.

When a society passes through political uncertainty, economic pressure, a jobs crisis and anxiety about the future, such initiatives by young people can have a positive impact in several areas. The film can become a message of possibility against despair.

At a time when many young people are living directionless lives and growing indifferent to social responsibility, when someone creates a creative way out of problems, it shows that hope has not entirely died. One film may not remove social despair, but it can build a space for hopeful thinking.

It is also being said that, amid a tendency for everything to be confined within politics, such work contributes to creating another language for society beyond politics. Standing within a conflict-ridden political situation, it also creates the possibility of seeing life on a scale larger than politics itself.

Well-wishers hope the confidence of this team — which grew from just six people to forty — reaches many more. They want the message of finding one's own voice through independent thought, mutual cooperation and experience to reach every institution.

They also hope the young team's creative work reaches audiences, sparks discussion and consolidates the power of culture. Creative culture should make space everywhere, they say, so that an organised creative force can stand in society against mob terror.

What remains to be seen is how audiences in the cinemas respond, and how many more young people this initiative inspires to step forward into creative work.