A modern state can identify its citizens and monitor its frontiers. It can also track movement across countries and continents. Yet sometimes it cannot decide what to do with a single human being.

For nearly two days, an elderly man stood stranded between Bangladesh and India near border pillar 1082 in Bakshiganj, Jamalpur. He had no food, no shelter and, more importantly, no country willing to accept him.

To move towards India invited intervention from the Border Security Force (BSF). To move towards Bangladesh risked confrontation with Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB).

Between two sovereign states stood a man effectively claimed by neither.

The scene was almost absurd in its simplicity. Two governments knew where he was. Two border forces watched him. Yet neither could resolve his predicament.

He occupied one of the modern world's strangest political spaces… a narrow stretch of land where the authority of states met but their protection did not.

As hunger deepened and uncertainty stretched on, villagers from the Bangladeshi side quietly slipped him water and dry food whenever they could. While institutions debated jurisdiction, ordinary people responded to a simpler reality….that a human being was suffering.

By the evening of June 10, he reportedly remained trapped.

Under such circumstances, arguing that this story deserves a film may seem insensitive. The man's ordeal is real. Yet precisely because it is so real, it deserves artistic treatment.

One day Bangladesh will need its own version of The Terminal, the film in which Steven Spielberg transformed bureaucratic statelessness into something audiences could feel rather than merely understand.

The old man at pillar 1082 is probably a reminder of how fragile human dignity can become when it collides with administrative systems.

The incident generated public attention, but not necessarily public empathy. Much of the discussion focused on whether the BGB was standing firm against the BSF. That conversation is understandable.

Border forces exist to protect territorial sovereignty, and their actions naturally attract scrutiny. Yet the focus on institutional confrontation risks obscuring the central focus in the whole narrative.

That the elderly man stranded between two states is not evidence in a geopolitical argument….he is the argument.

Need for artistic representation

This is where journalism reaches its limits and art begins its work.

News reports can tell us what happened. They can provide dates, locations, hard facts and official statements. They can document the number of push-ins, border killings or diplomatic protests.

What they often cannot do is make audiences inhabit the experience of those caught inside such events. Facts inform….but art compels.

Most people have never experienced statelessness. They have never stood in legal limbo, uncertain whether any government recognises them as its responsibility. They have never felt the peculiar terror of becoming a bureaucratic inconvenience.

Reading about such conditions creates awareness. Understanding them requires something more. It requires imagination. Cinema remains one of the most powerful tools for generating it.

That is why the absence of Bangladeshi films about the Bangladesh-India border is so striking.

The frontier has produced countless stories of displacement, migration, separation, violence and identity. It has divided families, altered communities and shaped generations.

Yet when one looks for cinematic explorations of these themes, an uncomfortable pattern emerges. Films such as Swapner Din, Shankhachil, Bisarjan, Bijoya and Sitara have examined the emotional consequences of borders and partition.

They have explored how arbitrary lines on maps can transform human lives. Yet most emerged from Indian filmmakers and reflected Indian artistic perspectives.

This is not a criticism of Indian cinema. If anything, it is a compliment. Indian filmmakers recognised that the border contained stories worth telling and told them.

The more troubling question is why Bangladeshi cinema has shown so little sustained interest in the same subject.

The silence becomes harder to ignore given recent developments. Over the past year, concerns over BSF killings, push-in operations and border tensions have become increasingly prominent in public discourse.

Journalists have reported incidents. Analysts have debated policy. Politicians have exchanged accusations. Yet artistic engagement has remained remarkably limited.

That absence matters because journalism and cinema perform different functions. Journalism explains events. Art explores their meaning.

The enduring appeal of The Terminal illustrates the distinction. Spielberg's film made viewers feel the peril. Audiences watched a man trapped by circumstances beyond his control and gained an emotional understanding of bureaucratic exclusion.

The film was not a documentary, nor did it claim perfect fidelity to reality. Its achievement lay elsewhere. It transformed an administrative problem into a human experience.

Empathy is, of course, among cinema's most valuable political functions.

Need for imagination

Bangladesh today produces films that travel to international festivals and earn critical acclaim. Yet remarkably few engage seriously with the human consequences of border politics.

This may not be the fault of individual filmmakers. It may instead reflect a broader failure within the country's cultural imagination to recognise which stories demand artistic attention.

Cinema possesses a unique ability to humanise abstraction. A news article informs readers that a man spent days stranded in no man's land. A film can make them feel every hour. It can show the anxiety in his face, the uncertainty in his voice and the slow erosion of hope.

It can transform statistics into people.

It can also ask questions that institutions cannot. The BGB's responsibility is to defend Bangladesh's borders. That duty is legitimate and necessary. But cinema can ask what happens to those who fall through the cracks of competing bureaucracies.

It can examine the tension between sovereignty and humanity. It can explore the moral costs of systems designed primarily to protect territory rather than people.

Such questions do not weaken the state. They strengthen the ethical foundations on which any state ultimately rests.

The irony is difficult to miss. Filmmakers across the border recognised the dramatic and moral significance of these stories years ago. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi audiences seeking artistic reflections on their own border realities often find themselves looking elsewhere.

A future Bangladeshi film need not replicate existing narratives. It could follow a man like the one stranded at pillar 1082. It could examine border guards struggling between duty and conscience.

It could focus on villagers risking inconvenience to help a stranger. Or it could pursue an entirely different path. The precise story matters less than the willingness to tell it.

Cinema will not solve border disputes. It will not eliminate geopolitical tensions or rewrite treaties. What it can do is reveal the human consequences of decisions made far from those forced to live with them.

It can insist that people trapped between states deserve more than a news cycle and a diplomatic statement.

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Jannatul Naym Pieal is a journalist based in Dhaka