by FIlmInk Staff
The Bangladeshi-Australian feature King in the Land of the Princess, directed by Asif Islam, has been selected for the Artcore section of the 48th Moscow International Film Festival, where it will have its World Premiere.
Blending docu-drama with live performance, the film is set within a makeshift rural opera environment and explores the erosion of Jatra, Bengal’s centuries-old folk theatre tradition, through the story of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah, a veteran performer navigating a cultural shift where audience attention is increasingly fragmented and harder for tradition to sustain itself. Based on true events and the life of its lead cast member, veteran Jatra artist Arabinda Majumdar (playing Nawab), the story draws on a reality that continues to unfold today.
Shot across seven consecutive nights in front of live audiences, the production merges staged narrative with real-time performance, creating a raw and unpredictable cinematic form that captures both the immediacy of performance and its communal experience.
The film stars Arabinda Majumdar alongside Ashna Habib Bhabna, Satej Chowdhury, Mahmud Alam, A.K. Azad Shetu, Salauddin Sheikh, and Jannatul Baker Khan.
Written by Leon, Asif Islam, and Jaganmoy Paul, the film also sees Asif serve as Director of Photography and Editor, with Sukanta Majumdar as Sound Designer. Asif’s debut feature Nirvana won the Special Jury Award at the 46th Moscow International Film Festival.
King in the Land of the Princess is produced by RedMark Films (Bangladesh) in association with Screenxcope (Australia), with Asif Islam and Sakib Iftekhar as producers. Dr. Zakir Hossain Raju serves as co-producer, and Jannatul Baker Khan as executive producer. Global sales are currently handled by Screenxcope Australia.
Asif Islam, director, said, “This project came from witnessing how something once powerful could quietly erode over time. I wanted to capture not just the performance, but the environment around it — the audience, the desire, the discomfort, and importantly, the silence that follows.”
Sakib Iftekhar, producer and founder of Screenxcope Australia, added, “This film sits at a point of rupture. It does not look at Jatra as something to be preserved, but as something being reshaped in real time, where tradition is negotiating with commerce and audience desire is actively redefining the form itself. That tension is what makes the film both urgent and universal.”
Dr. Zakir Hossain Raju, co-producer and film academic, said, “Jatra has historically functioned as a site of collective memory and socio-political expression. What the film observes is not merely its decline, but its transformation under new cultural economies, where spectatorship itself is being redefined.”
Premiering at one of the world’s longest-running film festivals, King in the Land of the Princess enters the international circuit as a work that bridges performance and cinema, documenting not only the decline of an art form but a broader shift in how audiences engage with cultural expression.
