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Why Dhritiman Chatterjee was chosen as Professor Shonku?

Sandip Ray is quite upbeat about his upcoming film ‘Professor Shonku O El Dorado’ where Dhritiman Chatterjee plays the titular role of the professor. The sci-fi adventure flick is based on Satyajit Ray’s story ‘Nokurbabu O El Dorado’.

Why he decided to cast Dhritiman as Professor Shonku, we asked the acclaimed director. “Shonku has to be a Bengali, and Dhritiman’s age and stature matched Shonku’s. I still remember in the first Shonku story he was a bit wacky and zany. But then Shonku became more serious. Shonku and Feluda are like synonymous with Satyajit Ray. There are so many similarities,” said Sandip Ray.

When asked why he selected this particular story as the first Shonku film, Sandip Ray explained initially he had two stories in mind, one is the Unicorn one and the second one is the El Dorado story.

“This is the right time to do a film on Shonku. I was thinking of two stories, but I figured that the Unicorn story will become too expensive logistically. The climax in the Unicorn story is out of this world… the visual effects have to be top class. The other choice was El Dorado. I am fascinated by Nakur Babu. He is a clairvoyant… also, in some of the Shonku stories, Shanku goes abroad after spending the first 15 minutes in Giridih… be it Germany or Brazil. But with this story, Nakur Babu can travel with Shonku and the film will have a Bengali connect. Of course, there will be conversations in English… and Shonku’s two friends, a German and Britisher, both understand Bengali, so this will be a bilingual film. Actually, we have two versions… the bilingual one and another is in Bengali for the outskirts. Also, I wanted to do the post-production in Calcutta, especially the visual effects. And that has happened,” added the director.