EXCLUSIVE! Food Talk: Actress Mehazabien Chowdhury on her film Saba and similarities of Bangladeshi & Kolkata cuisine | Not Just Bollywood

Actress Mehazabien Chowdhury loves biryani and calls herself ‘the biriyani girl’. She talks about her love for food and the different spices which makes Bangladeshi biryani so unique.

The only film from Bangladesh at the Red Sea International Film Festival was Saba. It is about a 25-year-old girl who lives in Dhaka with her demanding mother Shirin, a paraplegic whose frustrations and rage often find a target in the daughter who cares for her. The film shows the plight of a caregiver.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

There are a lot of similarities between Bangladeshi and Kolkata cuisine, can you enlighten us a little bit about the kacchi biryani which has been mentioned in your film Saba ?

I have been to some restaurants in Kolkata. I cannot recall the name, but I always felt that they make the same stuff but with different spices, and that makes the difference. And, I always love going back there. But yet there are some small changes in both the countries that make Kolkata food unique, and that also makes the Bangladeshi cuisine unique as well. But for me, I am a biryani girl. So, whether it is chicken or mutton biryani, I simply love it.

How is it different from the Indian biryani or the Calcutta biryani from Bangladeshi biriyani?

It is very much different. But it’s usually made out of mutton and rice. It could be basmati or in our country, sometimes it’s, chini gura (a special type of short grain rice). And the hero ingredient is the potato. We also add a lot of spices to it.

Coming back to your film Saba, how much do you relate to the character of Saba?

To be very honest, I actually don’t want to relate to _Sab_a. I always choose characters that are very much different from who I am in real life because, you know, usually what happens is, you know, the person or the actor himself herself is so big that they overshadow the character that they’re playing, and that is something that I don’t want to do. I don’t want people to watch Mehazabien when they are actually watching the movie. So, like, this is always my conscious choice that I make. I want my role to get highlighted, not me.