Bengal top cop Humayun Kabir has Sushmita, Raveena in mind for film on drug abuse

West Bengal DIG (traffic) Humayun Kabir, who made his directorial debut with the Bengali film Aleya, is working on a script on drug abuse. The yet-to-be-titled multilingual film (Bengali, Hindi and Telugu) will hit the floors in August and the IPS officer wants to cast Bollywood actresses Sushmita Sen and Raveena Tandon in it. He also plans to have Bengali actors Rituparna Sengupta and Ritwick Chakraborty on board. Kabir is in talks with his South Indian
counterparts for the Telugu portion of the film. “I am working on two more stories. While one is on substance abuse, the other will be based on child trafficking. As a cop who was posted across various districts
in West Bengal, I have come across many incidents and will try to use them,” he said.

The IPS officer might have entered filmdom, but he has no plans to make a career in filmmaking. However, he has always been interested in films and literature. When not occupied, Kabir likes to pen his thoughts.

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Just like his second film, his debut Bengali movie, Aleya, too, is inspired from real-life incidents. He has explored child marriage, triple talaq, school dropout rate and communal disharmony through the film. It ran into a controversy when Kolkata Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) asked the director to mute words such as Gujarat, Trishule gethe, Ahmedabad, Kafer and Jai Shri Ram.

The director didn’t get into any altercation and readily agreed to comply with the CBFC’s suggestions. “I was posted in Darjeeling and the film was already delayed. Now, I didn’t want to delay it further.
If a movie releases days after its completion, the seriousness of the subject fades away,” he said.

Now, all eyes are on his future projects that seem to have a lot of substance!

(The writer works for Eastern Chronicle, Kolkata)