An Orange Ship" by Noor Emran
The movie
that won the award was “An Orange Ship” by the director Noor Emran from
Bangladesh. It is about a journey on board of a huge ship that combines: a
coffin of a victim of a factory fire, the weeping husband of the victim who
fears his young son’s reaction, a criminal businessman who set fire in the
factory to get the insurance money, a complex character of a man who has
several jobs, as he leads a group of circus players to amuse the passengers, as
well as working as pimp who encourages a face-veiled whore to entertain some
customers, a middle class family who travel in a rich class cabinet beside the
businessman and a huge mass of poor persons on deck.
The filmmaker cleverly led
all of them and moved between their stories and characters. He succeeded to
express the society as a whole through his orange colored ship. The body of the
deceased woman rots, the businessman is abandoned by his crime collaborators
and is under the threat of imprisonment, the middle class family lives its
bourgeois rotten life, the multi-jobs quack is rather working in them to make a
living. His work includes being a pimp and religious preacher when needed. The
director Noor Emran is Muslim in a muted-faith society, nevertheless, he did
not feel embarrassed to criticize religious quacks through the character of
this man, or through the risks of using the face veil to hide and commit sins.
The filmmaker Arnab Middya used the face veil as well in his movie “Self Exile”,
in the fourth story of the movie about an unemployed husband and a wife who
accepts to work as a prostitute while she wears a face veil to hide, and her
husband plays the role of an Arab husband when they ride a car together…..In
“The Orange Ship”. Noor employed music and fine singing which is critical to
reality. They include a song of a political significance, similar to Sheikh
Imam and Negm’s songs,( Egyptian antigovernment Musician) about the necessity
of common tolerant co-life of Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims. Noor Emran
marvelously led the performers. I spite of the fact that we aspired to view
independent movies in the Forth Jaffna Film Festival, nonetheless, most movies
were rather traditional, expressing key or even controversial issues in a
realistic style
Safaa Elaisy Haggag
Egyptian Film Critic& Film Editor
October 2018
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