It is truly homecoming for Sayani Gupta as she forays into Bengali feature films with Homecoming. The film will also have Hindi and English dialogues. Although her first Bengali film was Tasher Desh (2012), the actor considers the Sony LIV film as her debut.

“I didn’t have dialogues in Tasher Desh. Homecoming is my first full-fledged Bengali film,” says the actor, adding that she was nervous to perform in her mother tongue. “[While] there is a certain degree of comfort in speaking your own language, I was nervous [wondering] if my Bengali was chaste enough. There’s a twang that comes from living decades outside Bengal.”

The musical drama also starring Tushar Pandey, Plabita Borthakur, Hussain Dalal and Soham Majumdar is written, directed, and produced by Soumyajit Majumdar, who is making his debut with this feature. Homecoming revolves around a group of friends from Kolkata who reunite after seven years at their old theatre space, which is in danger of being converted into a heritage hotel. The film captures the college life of the theatre folks.

“It was heartwarming to shoot in Kolkata. The shooting at Park Hotel [reminded me of my] childhood when we did family lunches there; it was also where I first went to the disco. Life felt like a full circle,” added Gupta. 

Homecoming was also selected for South Asia’s largest film market collection, NFDC Lab, in 2019.