The self-imposed challenge for director Kamar Ahmad Simon in his IDFA-premiering documentary, Day After…, is an interesting one. How to make something—a story, a narrative, something watchable, something satisfying—from quite amorphous material. Given that his film’s setting is the Rocket, an old Bangladeshi paddle steamer with a surfeit of passengers, he has just the start and ending of a journey as his sole linearity. Even that has several loops.
Fortunately, he does have something every ship ferrying human beings comes with: drama. But even so, he is required to fashion something from the many human dramas aboard such a vessel. The gift is his curse. And what he chooses eventually is to produce a lengthy documentary with many characters, many points of view, and, yes, several examples of the human drama. What he loses—what was always impossible to have, perhaps—is coherence.
The working metaphor is an obvious one. What else has a multitude of people, multiplicity of perspectives, cute kids dancing, cheeky humor, sadness, philosophical arguments, fights and so on and yet keeps going? The director, who is quite open about his incorporation of fiction into his documentary work, purposefully orchestrates some of what is seen, so one could say that, even here, there is an unseen hand. Well, maybe not entirely, because in one scene, some young women, who can see this unseen hand, ask one of the documentary’s major characters what exactly the people carrying a camera are doing? Where is the hero? Where is the heroine? If they could see a traditional leading actor, they wouldn’t mind parting with some money.
To be fair, they have a point. In attempting to present the ship as a vessel of humanity in the way that life is, Ahmad Simon is considerably self-indulgent. The film’s cacophony is charming but only sometimes and at almost two hours running time, the documentary is too long. We’ll never know whether focusing on a couple of characters might have served him better. What seems clear, though, is that the pattern chosen by the film might have served a novelist better. Although given the famous shortening of attention spans, that novelist might be better served if he belonged to a time closer to Tolstoy’s than to Sally Rooney’s.
It would definitely be best to see the film as a sort of sociological visual text about Ahmad Simon’s country Bangladesh—but the antics of some of the Day After… “cast” transcend that category. One young man has a star turn and some young people are engaged in romantic drama. A couple gets into one of those fights between lovers that start from petty sources and when, moments later, the warring pair turns tender, someone makes a statement that has to be common across cultures: it’s unwise to intrude on an issue involving romantic couples.
The young man with the star turn is named Al-Mamun. He carries his own camera everywhere he goes. Sometimes what the audience sees is what Al-Mamun’s own audience sees: his face in close-up. At other times, he is filmed in a wide angle shot as he talks to his phone screen. The film may serve as a sociological introduction to Bangladeshi society but, in such moments, it becomes an allegory for the way screens dominate our lives in contemporary times.
At some point, Al-Mamun boasts he has 50,000 subscribers, and someone asks for a translation of “subscribers”. It’s a small moment that captures both the global dominance of screens built by tech capitalists and how their products affect not just life but linguistics. It is in these small enlightening moments that Day After… earns the attention it requires. Al-Mamun hardly needs to work as hard to get the attention he seeks. His appeal is instantly clear the moment he appears onscreen. Since the year when his scenes were shot, the Mamun Vlogs channel on YouTube has grown to over 500,000 subscribers. You don’t need to see all 115 minutes of Day After… to realize that his success was always inevitable. And Ahmad Simon, who knows this very well, wisely chooses a shot of Al-Mamun talking to his audience in his earnest, comic style to close the documentary.
Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer: Kamar Ahmad Simon
Editor, Music: Saikat Sekhareswar Ray
Sound Design: Sukanta Majumdar, Alok De
Producer: Sara Afreen (Studio Beginning), Dominique Welinski (DW), Ingrid Lill Høgtun (Barentsfilm As)
Language: Bengali, English subtitles
Duration: 115 minutes
