Ei Sohorey, film poster

Posters for Ei Sohorey, a Bengali feature directed by Orpheus Mukhoty and produced by Delite Motion Pictures. Two designs, and the press material that came out of them.

The title means in this city, and the city is the third character. So it is not put behind the cast: it is grown out of them. Howrah Bridge, the Victoria Memorial and a street of traffic sit inside the hair and shoulders of the three faces, so the skyline and the people are one silhouette and you cannot look at one without the other.

The first design tears the faces into strips of red and grey, the way a wall of posters looks after a season of weather and pasting over. The second sets them whole against splashes of colour, quieter, and became the version the press ran. Both carry the same hand-drawn Bengali title, with a drop falling from the last letter: the film is not a gentle one, and the lettering says so before the images do.

The poster ran in Ekdin Bioscope and through the launch, which is the real test of a film poster. It has to work at the size of a newspaper column and on a stage behind a cast of twenty.