Adil Hussain joins Triparna Banerjee’s Riding On The Moon Boat

Adil Hussain will headline first-time filmmaker Triparna Banerjee’s Riding On The Moon Boat. The project was one of two Indian features selected for this year’s Asian Project Market at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea.

According to a report in Variety.com, the narrative feature is set in rural India and adapted from Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s story Mahesh, which translates to drought. It “will follow an adolescent girl who struggles to survive through drought, hardship and discrimination as her father is shunned by the majority of the village for engaging in a blasphemous act”.

Hussain told Variety magazine that he chose the project because his father, a fan of Chattopadhyay’s, had read the story to him when he was growing up in Assam. “It is a very, very contemporary story about things which are happening across the country and the world,” the actor told the publication.

Banerjee, who is professor of screenwriting at Hyderabad's Story Board School of Film and Design, started out as an associate producer of Shivajee Chandrabhushan’s National award-winning film Frozen (2007), which was also screened at Busan. She also collaborated with Chandrabhushan on his film One More (2012) which took part in the Asian Project Market in 2011.

Like Hussain, Banerjee heard the story as a child. She said in the report, “Though I had read Mahesh in school, when I revisited the story, I connected with it at a deeper level. Written 100 years ago, the story is still so pertinent, its relevance is increasing every day. I weaved a new story out of it, with the adolescent daughter of the farmer.”

She added, “Thematically what I am exploring is discrimination and human identity. We are all the same as humans, but we constantly isolate each other on the basis of race, colour, gender, religion, nationality, etc.”

Riding On The Moon Boat will be co-produced by Banerjee and Chandrabhushan’s White Owl Films and Kyoko Dan. The language of the film has not been indicated.

Jiju Anthony's A Miracle Of Love was the other Indian project selected at the Asian Project Market.