How A First-Time Director Crafted A Masterful, Brutal War-Epic

It is impossible to believe that war epic Children If War has been directed by a first-time filmmaker. How can a virgin artiste conceive such a vivid portrait of the rape of a civilization? This isn’t really a film. It’s a work of art, tempestuous and terrific. Children Of War shows how and why absolute power corrupts absolutely. Revisiting the Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971 it recreates with nerve-wracking vividness, the horrors of those times when suddenly a whole civilization was threatened with extinction. The director spares us none of the agonising details. Why should he? When humanity suffered first-world countries turned their faces away. It’s time to face the music.

The unannounced midnight knock and the graphic rape that follows, the brutal slayings of refugees on the run as they are intercepted and shot pointblank (in slow motion) on a river bridge as they try to escape, the leery Nazi-like army man peeing into war prisoner’s face…War never seemed more like a personal and political violation.

This is not a film for the squeamish. But then, war was never meant for the civilized. The sheer incivility of a strife where one bully-section of a country decides to teach another section of the people a lesson, is captured in layer after layer of unstrapped brilliance portraying the complete collapse of compassion.
The film is littered with passages of unbearable pain and, yes agonizing beauty. It is an indelible irony of all visual arts that human hurt makes for great visuals. The lush lyricism that Mrityunjay Devvrrat supplants to the suffering, never takes from the powerful statement on pain and suffering. Cinematographer Fasahat Khan shoots the chilling nights with prowling predators and ravaged women captured together to emblematise the essential conflict between sexual aggression and vulnerable victims.

There is no manipulation here in the merger of the murky band the magnificent. They have co-existed from time-immemorial. In this film, the ugly and the cherishable are so close together that you can touch both and come out as a changed film-viewer. The plot moves across several epic conflicts simultaneously. There is a teenager Rafiq (played with heartrending vulnerability by Riddhi Sen) who loses his entire family and his home and is left with only a sister (Rucha Inamdar) to flee from the brutality of his homeland to the relative safety of India. Rafiq’s journey becomes a metaphor of Bangladesh’s feral fight to freedom.

While the director has made extensive and telling use of documentary footage (including Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s rationale for Indian intervention in Bangladesh), there are many passages of unbounded symbolism leaping out of the screen. I was specially fascinated by a boat journey across a blood-soaked tell-tale river where a girl ‘sees’ ghosts and other casualties of war violence as they jostle tell her, it is not over yet.

At times like these, Mrityunjay Devvrrat seems to echo the pain-lashed operatic cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali. A true blue epic of mind-numbing intensity Children Of War is the kind of cinema that David Lean would have attempted were he a first-hand witness to the barbarism that went into the formation of Bangladesh. The film’s brutal brilliance and spiraling structure, if dread doom and devastation make you wonder how first-time director Mriyunjay Devvrat could muster such a masterly vision of human oppression and resilience.

At heart, this is a conventional lovely story of a couple (Indraneil Sengupta & Raima Sen) separated by sudden war. Standing forlorn silhouetted by barbed wires in a concentration camp designed in Hitler’s twisted mind, Raima sometimes looks way too beautiful to be a victim. She can’t help it. Along with her every member of the cast rises above his or her personality to become part of the director’s epic design. Special mention must be made of Pavan Malhotra, Tilotama Shome (playing a human bomb), Riddhi Sen (so young and so much pain!) and Victor Bannerjee in a memorable cameo as a traveling refugee reminds us that humanism and barbarism are neighbours.

Aiding the actors to achieve the acme of authenticity is the film’s mesmeric sound-design and music. In one harrowingly graphic sequence, a rock-anthem reverberates across the skyline as drains filled with blood tell sagas of the savagery that awaits just outside our homes.

Genocide is not only history. It is what a country gets when intolerance is encouraged by political interests. There are visuals and sounds of pain and anguish in this turbulent treatise on one of history’s worst atrocities that will stay with me forever

Director Mriyunjay Devvrat spoke about the film at length. He shared, “This film, forged in the crucible of historical truth and human resilience, stands as a testament to our unwavering commitment to honesty—honesty to the story, to the craft, to our audience, and to ourselves. Creating Children of War was a journey marked by a profound dedication to authenticity. Every frame, every line of dialogue was crafted with the utmost respect for the real events and the people who lived through them. We sought to capture not just the facts, but the very essence of the human spirit that endured such unimaginable suffering.”

“The crew of the film aimed to push the boundaries of what could be achieved in the budget and time we had. From the haunting cinematography to the powerful performances, every element was meticulously crafted to serve the story with the highest level of authenticity. In them I met some beautiful people who will always be close to my heart, this film is everything it is because of the relentless effort put in by them. The performances by our incredible cast, the evocative score, and the immersive production design all worked in harmony to create a visceral experience that I hope left a lasting impact on the viewer,” he added.