Stories to unite Bangladesh

Since the fall of a brutal dictator in Bangladesh last July, the interim government set in its place has insisted that the task of reinventing society belongs to the people. This week it put that ideal to work.

On Tuesday, officials dispatched eight venerated local movie directors throughout the South Asian country to mentor a new generation of filmmakers. Remembering Monsoon Revolution – a reference to the student-led movement that ousted Sheikh Hasina after 15 years of hard reign – is the first of seven initiatives meant to forge a new sense of nationhood through art and archiving.

The focus on cultural production underscores that rebuilding nations involves more than organizing elections or fixing broken economies. One of the most effective tools for stitching societies back together is storytelling.

“The establishment of a cultural bridge is crucial after the revolution,” said Mostofa Sarwar Farooki when placed in charge of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in November. “We want to ensure that Bangladesh represents everyone – many people, many religions, many languages, and all cultures will be at the center of our policy.”

The goal of the film initiative is to produce two documentaries and six fiction stories by the end of May. The other initiatives will engage musicians, cartoonists, writers, painters, and stage actors, resulting in concerts, exhibitions, and collaborative albums. A digital oral history project will gather the individual stories of ordinary citizens.

Stirring public dialogue with art has helped other societies restore trust and empathy by encouraging independent thinking and deep listening across divided communities. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, storytelling enabled “people to explore different ways to deal with difficult wartime memories, to challenge dominant historical narratives, and to question conventional concepts of identity,” wrote Nerkez Opačin, a research fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, in 2015.

In Somalia, the United Nations has helped turn poets into peacemakers. “Poetry has the power to connect people on a deep, emotional level,” one young performance poet, Zahra Abdihagi, said in a U.N. interview last July. “It provides a safe and expressive outlet for people to process their trauma, share their stories, and work towards forgiveness and understanding.”

The launch of the film project in Bangladesh this week coincides with a vibrant public debate among students, teachers, and others over the drafting of a proclamation on the meaning of the July revolution and the kind of society that should emerge from it. Their vibrant civic engagement offers a model for countries in similar states of transition, such as Syria and Sri Lanka.

“The July revolution presented us an opportunity to rebuild,” Mr. Farooki, a filmmaker himself, told Variety magazine this week, to “move towards a beautiful, democratic society where there is freedom of expression, fair justice for all and no corruption.”