Scripts at Film Archive speaks of the golden era

BFA has a rich collection of prints, photographs as well as scripts and synopsis of many films both from past and present. The total number of the synopsis of the films is 1365, which are the gist of the stories. There are also a good number of scripts of some special movies, which are artistic or commercially successful. 'But we give privilege to the award winning movies and to some of the rare collections,' says Nazrul Islam, 'we have about 1986 scripts of different films.' He also added that the authority could not collect all the good movies of the past as they were not preserved properly and were either lost or destroyed.

The main source of these scripts is the Censor Board of Bangladesh but the old films have been collected from the personal archive of some individuals. Nazrul Islam says, 'It was indeed tough to put these things together for the archive as we had to run to various directors, scriptwriters, producers or to some individual people.'

These scripts contain sequences, location and dialogues of concerned films. The scripts, however, do not include the sequences of songs in details because 'those were written or determined afterwards', says Nazrul Islam.

'There are signs on these scripts that the writers or directors worked with at different locations.' Nazrul Islam said amusingly, 'There are stains of tea that they had while working with those scripts!’