A man befriends a cloud, in a touching debut by filmmaker Abhinandan Banerjee

“Can I see your cats, please?” writer and filmmaker Abhinandan Banerjee says, his face breaking into a smile. One of my three feline housemates has just walked into the Zoom frame.

We’ve been discussing his critically acclaimed debut film, Manikbabur Megh (The Cloud and the Man). How it has been making waves in West Bengal since its release there in July. And has since been picked up for release in the US, via Outsider Pictures.

Banerjee, 32, has been the quintessential arthouse director, talking intensely about the “grammar of cinema”, and taking deep drags of a cigarette as he unpacks the “spiritual allegory” at the heart of his film.
All that stops for the cats. When he turns to them, his face lights up with pure, unadulterated joy.
“I was saved by a cat once, when I was about to kill myself,” he says, with piercing honesty. “I think I needed to hear that sound of ‘meow’… and somehow I was okay.”
The exchange exemplifies the unique sensibility — a mix of deep-rooted sadness, quiet sensitivity and a boundless love for nature — that makes Manikbabur Megh so compelling. Shot almost entirely in black-and-white, with minimal dialogue, the 97-minute film follows a lowly, middle-aged clerk in Kolkata who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a cloud. Situated somewhere between social commentary and magic realism, it is full of quiet loneliness, grief and hope.
Out of the shadows
Like his protagonist, Banerjee has always felt a little out of place, never quite fitting into his social milieu, he says. Growing up in Kolkata, he felt stuck, unable to make friends. He found refuge in Bengali literature, particularly stories by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay that touched upon his favourite themes: nature, horror and mysticism.
By the time he was 14, he was contributing short stories and non-fiction to local magazines and newspapers.
He moved to Mumbai to study architecture, and realised that what he wanted was to make films instead. He dropped out of college and joined Little Lamb, a production house co-founded by husband-wife duo Bauddhayan Mukherji and Monalisa Mukherji.
“He must have thought I was mad, this kid who wanted to make movies,” Banerjee says. “But he and Monalisa both encouraged and supported me, helping me begin my filmmaking journey.”
Banerjee co-wrote Teenkahon (2014), a triptych mystery-thriller directed by Bauddhayan Mukherji and produced by Little Lamb. The film was a critical success, playing at 32 international film festivals and winning a number of awards. For Banerjee, it was a crash course in filmmaking, as he pitched in with everything from location-scouting to post-production.
“At 21, it was amazing to see something I’d written on the big screen, at major film festivals,” he says. “It gave me the confidence that I could do this.”
When his father fell ill, in 2015, Banerjee returned home for three years (he has since moved back to Mumbai). In Kolkata, he set up a creative agency and production house named Asterisc Studios. And he came up with the story about a man and a cloud.
He pitched his film idea to the Mukherjis and, hours later, Little Lamb had signed on as producer.
Banerjee worked on the script and pre-production for over two years, finally shooting it over 14 days in Kolkata, in 2019.
Determined to use the universal cinematic language of visuals and sounds, rather than dialogue, to tell his story, he realised he needed an actor who could communicate complex emotions with just micro-expressions and micro-gestures. He found this in 61-year-old theatre veteran Chandan Sen, who is charming and deeply evocative as Manik Babu.
“More than a face, I needed a mind that could encapsulate or imbibe the gravitas of the character,” Banerjee says. “And Chandan-da is a wildlife lover who doesn’t like city life much, and leaves for the jungle or the mountains every couple of months. So he was able to portray the character with immense sensitivity.”
The other central character in the film is the city of Kolkata, which Banerjee captures with the clear-eyed tenderness of a man who sees both its beauty and its squalor, but would really much rather be in the mountains anyway.
“If you don’t have darkness, you can’t show the light,” he says. “I needed this film to be set in the city to showcase the suffocation, the anxiety of this socially unfit man who is constantly rejected… who goes unseen.”
On the horizon
The screenings at over 25 film festivals, including in Hong Kong, Edinburgh and Santa Barbara, and the release in the US, are exciting. But it is Manikbabur Megh’s long theatrical run in India — extremely rare for an independent art film — that gives him the most joy, Banerjee says.
“We thought it would run for a week or two, but it’s still running,” he says.
Life will change for Banerjee now. He is already working on the screenplay for a Hindi streaming series. He has set up an animation studio, Nandanik, that is working on three animated shorts and a 2D animated feature.
He is writing his debut graphic novel, and an anthology of horror stories that he hopes to put out this year. He still contributes horror short stories to print magazines, and writes for the Mirchi Bangla radio show Sunday Suspense Originals.
“All I have are stories,” Banerjee says. “And jungles, and mountains, and cats.”