2 National Award winning child actors hail from Sunderbans

Nur Islam and Samiul Alam, now studying in class 3 and 6 in a local school, were picked up for the roles which required them to speak in a local dialect, the film's debutant director, Manas Mukul Pal, said here. The two got the national awards in the Best Child Artist category (Rajat Kamal) and Rs 50,000 for Sahaj Pather Gappo based on Bibhuti Bhusan Bandyopadhyay's short story Tal Nabami. "I was looking for two children who are conversant with the dialect used in the Sunderbans and who will be instinctive and uninhibited, bereft of urban mannerisms," he said. They were selected after visiting primary schools in the villages in the Basirhat sub-division belt, Manas said. Not only the two, almost 80 percent of the actors belonged to different villages in the area, the director said. The families of Nur and Samiul were not familiar with the term "national award for films" but when they learnt its implications on the day of announcement, they were overjoyed, Manas said. The title of Sahaj Pather Gappo, he said, was taken from Rabindranath Tagore's Sahaj Path, the book which introduces a child to Bengali language.