About 100 doctors and four medical students got together at Calcutta Medical College and Hospital on Sundays over three months in end-2023. They were going not to attend a conference or man the wards but to face the camera. And directing them was an internal medicine specialist from the class of 1999.
On Wednesday, the curtain will come down on the five-day-long 190th anniversary celebrations of Calcutta Medical College and Hospital with the screening of the feature film Protyabartan, among other programmes.
“It’s a 130-minute film. Everyone involved, except the assistant director and the cameraman, are graduates from our college,” said Suddhasatwya Chatterjee, the director.
This is the core crew’s third screen venture after two short films, Siddhanta and Simana, made over the past two years.
“We had done the first two films under the banner of a doctors’ organisation formed during the pandemic, called Protect the Warriors (PTW), aimed to equip medics serving in Covid wards with PPE kits at a time they were in short supply. The first film addressed the worsening relations between doctors and patients with rising incidence of assault at hospitals. But Protyabartan is a venture of the Medical College Ex-Students’ Association,” said ENT specialist Abhik Ghosh, secretary of PTW and the reunion committee.
“The story was written by orthopaedic surgeon Chinmoy Nath, on doctors at a reunion reminiscing about life on campus 20 years back. It was not planned as a feature film. But as the shooting progressed, we realised the story could not be told within an hour,” said Chatterjee, who had also directed the 40-minute film Simana to build on his experience of directing plays.
Shooting for Protyabartan took place at actual locations on and off campus, including the library, anatomy lab, Kumar’s canteen and Putiram.
Among the cast, the most experienced is endocrinologist Ayan Mukherjee, who has acted in several short and feature films. “I had to lose 20kg in three months to play the lead role of one of the students. Suddhasatwyada played the older age version of me,” said the 34-year-old.
The oldest actor is 76-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon Siddhartha Chakraborty, who played a student’s father.
“Doctors from 15-20 batches have acted, including four current students who are boarders of Swarnamoyee, the girls’ hostel. The maximum number is from our batch. Yet they look so different now that some, like Abhishek Basu and Erina Pandey, have played teachers and someone like ophthalmologist Pallavi Raj, though of the same age, has played a student participating in a fashion show filmed as part of a freshers’ welcome,” said Chatterjee.
Chatterjee, Mukherjee and Ghosh flew to London for a day for some shots of the lead character, shown to have settled abroad.
“Our batchmate in London, critical care specialist Abhimanyu Bhattacharya, took aerial shots on a drone camera that we are using. The music has been scored by another UK-based alumnus, Siwalik Banerjee,” Chatterjee said.
“I sang four of the six songs in the film, of which I composed and wrote two. Distance hardly matters these days,” said Banerjee, a rheumatologist attached to Warwick Medical School.
Ahead of the film’s screening, there is excitement in the community.
“I may have given interviews on TV but this is my first appearance on the big screen,” grinned urologist Tridibes Mandal of the class of 1999, who walked as the showstopper in the fashion show.
The screening will be held at the college auditorium at 2pm on Wednesday.
The doctors aim to have a theatrical release later this year.
“This is the biggest reunion in our history and we wanted to do something special. It encompasses everything that a medical student goes through — love, separation, hours in the canteen, election, freshers’ welcome and even a football match, possibly the first Bengali film showing doctors playing ball after Uttam Kumar’s Saptapadi… It will make people realise that we too have a life,” said Ghosh.