Sudipto Chakma was born and brought up in Pencharthal. a town in Unakuti district of Tripura. He completed his schooling from Pencharthal, then did his graduation in Agriculture from Dehradun and completed the course in 2017.
He grew up watching Chakma films, like "unducheyboiddo", etc. He is closely associated and connected with the production houses as well. In 2010-11, he and his friends participated in various chakma cultural events like Bizu (The chakma festival that celebrates the New Year of the community). Also, in the later years, he with his friends actively participated in dance battle events at Agartala, mostly hip-hop. In 2013, he shifted to Dehradun for his higher education.
He talks about a man who was very fond of children and he taught them too. The man would contact the village children who were into music. He has a nephew with whom he used to play when they were kids, and gradually they got close. Slowly they started holding cameras, initially they had no idea on how to create/edit videos or had knowledge on marketing stuffs, they were just driven by some kind of excitement and they started off by making videos for fun.
Later, they began their journey on YouTube, in 2017 they made a group and debuted on their YouTube channel named as 'Eruk Films'. They release videos and short movies on their channel. The channel was originally founded by him and his nephew, eventually many others joined and contributed in the videos.
This year they planned to release many videos, also it has become very difficult to make income through YouTube, plus making a video costs a lot and there are various other challenges as well. He learnt all skills required for film-making from YouTube tutorials, he also quotes, it is never perfect, something is always incomplete or not enough." Currently, they are working on producing music videos.
He says, 'As teens, we do not have any cultural or historical consciousness and mostly we are naïve that time. Even the children are not made aware of the historical importance of community. I have friends from Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram from whom I learnt about the discrimination faced by Chakma community.' He frequently visits the temple and makes conversations with the monks about the Chakma community issues, they share and exchange knowledge/ideas on how to deal with those problems.
He doesn't have any particular future plan as such because plans always keep on changing. He hopes that in the future he and his crew will be able to build a society that is meant to influence the people in understanding the community in a better way. Most of his videos/projects focuses on influencing and spreading awareness on the chakma community culture. His video titled as "JU-JU" was intended to let the people know that, it is the word to say 'Hello' in Chakma language, as earlier people were not very acquainted with the word.
According to him, music videos attracts more viewers compared to the talk videos, and as a result earning becomes much easier through music videos. They aim at producing videos which are innovative and new for the community. He has a dream of
making a video/film on the chakma community's displacement which happened during India's partition and submitting it in Bollywood. The project would require huge financial support and funding, however he would like to give it a go once. He believes in interacting with people belonging from diverse backgrounds and learning from each one of them.
0 Comments