For this he chooses Brahmananda’s guru as his mouthpiece. However, Srijit becomes a bit didactic in his approach to cinema about which he comes across as passionate and seems to worship. In the sequence involving Himadri’s request to Bramhananda, Srijit inserts the hopeless director’s back story in a neat way. Arka Roy, Brahmanda’s cinematographer, is named after the sun god, cinematography being an art which requires the medium of light or rather is the play of light, and so on and so forth. Himadri is another name for the Himalayas. Brahmananda is actually Lord Brahma – the creator in Hindu mythology. Here’s also another example of Srijit’s penchant for playing with names. However he is the only one who can actually make Uma’s dream come true. He is someone who has suffered material losses for being unable to move with the times as far as his cinema was concerned, and also emotionally, as his wife leaves him with their only son in tow. But finally, with the help of a film producer, a director and his team, Himadri brings to fruition the Durga Puja.įrom a simple tale of a father and daughter the canvas enlarges to include Brahmananda Chakravarty, a successful failure of a film director who comes on board to create the illusion or rather this dream project. Here he meets with some opposition, as this sounds ridiculous to a lot of people. Rooted in the father’s deep desire to create an early Durga Puja in March and make his daughter’s last wish come true, the father at first travels to Kolkata to set up the Durga Puja in the month of March. Uma is terminally ill and may not survive until October when Bengalis celebrate the festival. In his story Uma is a young girl who lives somewhere in the picturesque Switzerland with her single parent, her father Himadri, who also doubles up as her mother.Īs the story progresses we find that Uma has a deep desire to be a part of the Durga Puja festivities in the city of Kolkata (numerous stories of which she has heard from her father she also hopes to meet her mother who left them when Uma was two years old). Srijit’s Uma however just touches on the fringes of this lore. Uma is the symbol of power in the Hindu mythology, who singlehandedly vanquished the demon Mahishashura and restored heaven to the gods who had been banished from their abode by the demon. He then set about writing a story based on the Bengali festival of Durga Puja, with an eponymous heroine, for Uma is the other name by which the goddess Durga is invoked.
It is based on a real story, which by the director’s own admission he found on Facebook. Uma is Srijit Mukherji’s twelfth film in seven years.