Deshantori

Watched Mridul Chowdhury's documentary Deshantori (via Google Video). This is a docu-drama, which portrays the struggles of 26 Bangladeshis to illegally migrate to Spain through the Mediterranean Sea and Sahara desert. It starts with the illusions about the West of the common Bangladeshi youth.

Mezba did a review on this. Some excerpts:

The movie had a couple of quotes that I remember. For example, this girl chides her friend, "You are ready to get up at 6 in the morning and work hard all day once you reach London, yet today in Bangladesh you stay in bed till noon and then decry nothing is getting done in Bangladesh! It's not the country's fault that you are lazy!"

There was another. The professor rants about how Bengalis tend to have an inferiority complex where anything good is foreign and anything bad is homegrown. This same professor also asks "whose fault is it that people choose an uncertain death abroad over a certain life in Bangladesh".

This documentary tries to answer some of the questions.