Beyond the Circle

"Two years ago, Festival audiences discovered a lovely surprise in On the Wings of Dreams. In this gentle, humane fable, director Golam Rabbany Biplob showed the richness of village life in Bangladesh, even as he explored the modern tensions that threaten it. In his follow-up feature Beyond the Circle, Biplob finds a moral tale in the pressing and inevitable shift now facing his society: the move from the village to the city. Haripada is a musician in the rural north. He is Hindu but has adopted a Muslim boy, Moqbul, into his family. His only brush with urban life came when a reporter once interviewed him about his music. When that interview is eventually published, the journalist, Selim, returns and invites Haripada to come to Dhaka. A...