CREDIT: Courtesy of Mostofa Sarwar Farooki
Bangladeshi filmmaker Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s “No Bed of Roses” (“Doob” in Bengali), starring and co-produced by India’s Irrfan Khan (“Inferno”) has fallen afoul of the Bangladesh administration and is effectively banned.
Speculation has been rife in the Bangladeshi and Indian media that the film is a biopic loosely based on late Bangladeshi writer and filmmaker Humayun Ahmed who divorced his wife of 27 years and married an actress 33 years his junior. Farooki has denied that the film is a biopic. Variety has had access to the film. It begins with a disclaimer that the film has no resemblance to any real life characters alive or dead. Khan plays a filmmaker named Javed Hasan who leaves his wife and marries an actress who was his daughter’s classmate in school.
The film is a co-production between Bangladesh’s Jaaz Multimedia and India’s Eskay Movies with Khan’s IK Company as co-producer. The Bangladesh Film Development Corporation’s (BFDC) Joint Venture Preview Committee approved the script on March 8, 2016 after which the film went into production. The completed film was previewed for the BFDC on February 12, 2017 and received a No Objection Certificate on Feb. 15. On Feb. 16, the BFDC sent the production a letter stating that the certificate had been cancelled due to a letter from the Bangladesh Information Ministry