The Keysmith (Chabiwala) is a story of a key-smith who travels to the city to meet his long-lost beloved. She is however married to someone of the same faith as hers. The key-smith however has no idea of where she is.

The press conference for this film took place at the 28^th KIFF in the presence of the director Raja Ghosh, Amrita Chattopadhyay, Kaushik Kar, music composer Nabarun Bose, and others.

The director said that the main idea behind this film came when he met a keysmith Bickram Ali, aged 79 years at Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Street. “There are different kinds of keys in a key chain. One might be of your door and the other might be of your almirah and so on. Similarly, in the same way, the characters in my film exist with one another. They all come together to make this key chain complete” said the director.

Apart from Amrita and Kaushik, the cast consists of Subhashish Mukherjee and Sohag Sen in pivotal roles.

Amrita said “When I first heard the script, Raja da said that we will complete the shoot in 3 days. I went through the script and understood that we will have to do about 18 scenes per day to complete the film in 3 days. That was not feasible. We all made him understand that aspect. Ultimately the film was shot in 21 days. He has made us shoot the film in places that no one can even imagine. We were obedient artists and we followed him wherever he asked us to go”.

The actress was also proud that Chabiwala was the only Bengali film that was part of the Asian Select along with other films in different other languages.

The cinematographer of the film is Prosenjit Chowdhury.

The editing has been done by Anirban Maity.

The 119 minutes film has been selected under the Asian Select (NETPAC Award).

Video link of the press conference- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDEM9V-I6bc

Priyanka Dutta