April 24, 2013, will remain a dark chapter in Bangladesh's history. At 8:45am that morning, the Rana Plaza building in Savar, Dhaka, collapsed. In this tragic incident, 1,175 garment workers lost their lives, and over 2,000 were injured.

Like many others, filmmaker Kamar Ahmad Simon was deeply affected by the tragedy. Life, in its constant motion, often buries such pain like the turning of a newspaper page. Yet, some events continue to raise questions—they haunt us for years. The director had already been feeling such restlessness since the Tazreen Fashions fire. After the Rana Plaza collapse, he felt the urge to bring the pain on the screen.

In 2015, he made "Testimony of a Thread" (Bengali title: Ekti Shutar Jobanbondi). As the director explains, "I made the film out of a citizen's responsibility."

A decade after the Rana Plaza tragedy, "Testimony of a Thread" has been made available to the public. On April 24, it will premiere on the OTT platform Chorki. The film can be watched for free—viewers can access it by simply installing the Chorki app on their mobile or PC.

Kamar Ahmad Simon had long wanted to make a feature film on Rana Plaza. "Testimony of a Thread" was created from the research material collected for that project. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon", this 52-minute monologue-collage attempts to find the human faces behind one of the most catastrophic structural failures in modern history.

Kamar Ahmad Simon

Kamar's debut film "Shunte Ki Pao!" was a non-fiction feature that received both national and international acclaim. After the monologue-collage "Testimony of a Thread", he made the docudrama "Neel Mukut", which was released on Chorki during the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, his hybrid film "Onnodin..." (Another Day...), previously held up at the censor board, is set to be released. Last year, his fiction film "Shikolbaha" premiered in Shanghai.

Kamar Ahmad Simon won the prestigious Asian Pitch award for the script of "Testimony of a Thread" in 2013. After the film's completion in 2015, it was first screened in 2016. The film presents the Rana Plaza tragedy and its related issues from four different perspectives—garment workers' rights activist Nazma Akter, former BGMEA president Rubana Huq, artist Dilara Begum Jolly, and economist and professor MM Akash.

Although there were opportunities to release it earlier, the film is only now becoming available on OTT, ten years after its creation. Why? Kamar Ahmad Simon says, "'Testimony of a Thread' is a very demanding film—perhaps it was made before its time. The same thing happened with my first film 'Shunte Ki Pao!', which was also released on Chorki nearly a decade later. These films don't have any give-and-take relationship with our mainstream film practices. For a long time, our cultural scene had no space for responsibility or empathy. Now, however, things have shifted. People are beginning to reassess old structures and search for new paths. That's why the questions raised by 'Testimony of a Thread' are more relevant than ever. Keeping the debates alive is crucial. Today's audiences are also more exposed and familiar with diverse forms—fiction, non-fiction, and hybrid content from across the globe. So, it makes sense to release the film in the public domain now."

Written and directed by Kamar Ahmad Simon, the monologue-collage is produced by Sara Afreen. The film was produced by the production house "Shuchona" in collaboration with four major Asian broadcasters—NHK (Japan), KBS (South Korea), PTS (Taiwan), and MediaCorp (Singapore).