OK, so it has taken me a few months to find the time to edit the material shot by our friend Séamas McSwiney. Still, now you can see a special edition of the Shyama podcast about how the film was received at the Kolkata Film Festival in November 2009.
I should mention that it’s Séamas who persuaded us to submit Shyama to the Kolkata Film Festival and without whom we and the film would not have been there. Once there, we had the opportunity to meet various friends and well-wishers, including Jim Haynes, Faruck Haidar, Gautam & Sumita Halder, Soumitra Mitra and Séamas. We also took the opportunity to explore the Satyajit Ray Film and TV Institute and visited the Rabindranath Tagore Centre, whose director, Reba Som, included Shyama in the festival ‘Tagore beyond frontiers’ at the Rabindranath Tagore Centre the following month.
Séamas joined Kaberi and me in our various encounters in Kolkata and kept a video diary of our progress. This special episode of the Shyama podcast is a summary and includes our responses to various questions at the Shyama press conference on the last day of the festival. Our thanks to everyone we met during the Kolkata Film Festival, particularly the Festival team and those at the Satyajit Ray Film and TV Institute who helped us with our various technical questions.
I would like to meet Séamas McSwiney. I am Cathal MacSwiney Brugha. We are probably related. I am coming to Kolkata on December 14th for two weeks.