Jaya Ahsan’s fashion film “Hues of Longing” has been selected for the 13th London Fashion Film Festival 2026 in the UK, adding another international credit to the Bangladeshi actor’s growing body of work outside conventional cinema. Written and directed by Randeep Bhattacharya and Yudhajit Bagchi, the three-minute-and-25-second film was produced under the banner of Mumbai-based Yanus Films.
The film draws its inspiration from French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau’s celebrated monodrama “The Human Voice,” using that source material as a lens to explore absence in love, memory, and the quiet ache of waiting. Fashion films of this kind lean on the genre’s blend of visual style and narrative storytelling, using clothing, setting, and mood as much as dialogue to carry emotional weight.
A Colonial-Era House on the Hooghly
The film was shot last year in Serampore, West Bengal, the shared hometown of directors Bhattacharya and Bagchi. Production took place entirely inside an old colonial-era house on the banks of the Hooghly River, with its weathered walls, open verandas, and shifting interplay of light and shadow forming the visual backbone of the film’s themes. Jaya described the project as an experimental undertaking and called her experience making it extraordinary, with styling handled by Rishabh, a collaborator she has worked with before.
A Recognition She Won’t Attend in Person
Despite the selection, Jaya will not be present at the festival in London, as the dates conflict with her current shooting schedule. Her absence doesn’t diminish the significance of the honour for a project she has described in personal terms, one built more around mood and restraint than dialogue-driven performance.
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Part of a Busy Stretch Across Formats
The selection lands during an active period for Jaya, who has spent 2026 moving fluidly between Bengali cinema, cross-border productions, and now short-format fashion filmmaking. Earlier this year, she starred in the Bengali psychological thriller “OCD,” directed by Soukarya Ghosal, and continues to be one of the most consistent bridges between the film industries of Bangladesh and West Bengal. Her recognition with “Hues of Longing” reflects a willingness to experiment outside feature-length narrative work, taking on a compressed, almost poetic format built entirely around emotional atmosphere rather than plot.
Summary: Jaya Ahsan’s short fashion film “Hues of Longing,” inspired by Jean Cocteau’s “The Human Voice,” has been selected for the 13th London Fashion Film Festival 2026.
