Mountains of the Moon

Mountains of the Moon (2013)

চাঁদের পাহাড়

Chander Pahar follows Shankar Choudhury, a 20 year-old that takes a job working for the Uganda Railway, and winds up quitting his job in search of diamonds and the Kenya's Mountain of the Moon. Based on the popular Bengali adventure novel of the same name.

Date of release
2013-12-20
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (19)
Runtime
2h 29m
Genres
Adventure, Mystery
Director
Kamaleswar Mukherjee
Collection
Chander Pahar Trilogy

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Chander Pahar

Chander Pahar is a 2013 Indian Bengali-language action-adventure film based on Chander Pahar by Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, directed by Kamaleshwar Mukherjee and produced by Mahendra Soni and Shrikant Mohta under the banner of their production house Shree Venkatesh Films. It features Bengali actor Dev in the lead role as Shankar. This is the first collaboration between Dev and Mukherjee, the latter having made only two films before: Uro Chithi and Meghe Dhaka Tara. It was dream project of Late Filmmaker Tarun Majumdar.

Production

Director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee mentioned Chander Pahar as his "dream project". But he even compared the project to a "double-edged sword" as he realized the challenges while looking for locations in South Africa for a month. When Shree Venkatesh Films agreed to produce the film, they wanted a big star in the lead. As a result, it was decided that actor Dev would play the role of Shankar.

For this special project, Kamaleshwar has a Maasai proverb in mind: "If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space." He added that he was lucky enough as Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, author of Chander Pahar, had such a fertile imagination that, without having visited Africa, he had a clear idea about the landscape. Even Dev said that the shooting of Chander Pahar was going to be the most exciting few days of his life.

A source close to the Chander Pahar unit revealed that the production house wanted a big star to play Shankar, the adventurer protagonist. At the beginning, Dev and Parambrata's names had come up. However, Kamaleshwar Mukherjee later said that Dev was in his and the producer's (Shree Venkatesh Films) minds from the beginning.

Most of the cast members of Chander Pahar are from South Africa. It took a lot of time to decide who was going to play the role of Diego Alvarez, the Portuguese explorer, who has a supporting role. It was later disclosed that, among others, South African actor Gérard Rudolf has been assigned the role of Alvarez. He even has a dialogue in Bengali, where he tells Shankar, "Ishwar Tomar Mongol Korun" (meaning, God Bless You).

Kamaleshwar Mukherjee said that he was sending a translated version of the script to the actors and added that, they were so professional that they had already read up about Chander Pahar on the Internet.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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