Nafee Muhammad Anam‘s ‘Uncanny Episodes’ for Amazon Prime to feature Misir Ali

Promising author Nafee Muhammad Anam discovered his interest in reading from a young age. He spent most of his time reading mystery, horror and thriller stories as well as fairytales, for the better part of his high school days. His interest in reading led him to writing his own stories, limericks and poems. His first story, The Miracle Hours, was published in Kishor Tarokalok in October 2001. Since then, his writings have been published by many prominent publishers in Bangladesh. Currently, Nafee resides in London.

Nafee is the editor of Horror Potrika, the first Bengali fiction magazine printed and distributed by Amazon. “Horror Potrika is a really personal project of mine. I published it because I wanted to read stories by other people,” says Nafee. “The mission of the magazine is to captivate the readers with tales of murder, rape and corruption among other things, and hopefully, deliver good lessons along the way.”

He is developing an anthology web series titled, Uncanny Episodes, for Amazon Prime Video. One of the standalone episodes of the series, a psychological thriller titled Bhoy, will feature Misir Ali, the popular character in a series of novels by legendary author Humayun Ahmed. Uncanny Episodes is a dream project of Nafee’s. He aims to bring well-known Bangladeshi stories to a global audience through the anthology series.

He further opened up about why he picked the character of Misir Ali for the episode, Bhoy. “I took permission for this from Humayun Ahmed a long time ago, but I stopped working on it after he passed away,” explains Nafee, who is an avid fan of the Misir Ali series. “But many established writers and directors, especially Animesh Aich, who played a role in Debi, encouraged me to make it. While working on other stories for Uncanny Episodes, I suddenly remembered that I have the permission to produce projects on Misir Ali and I was determined to make the character a part of the series.”  Nafee is in the last stages of developing the script for Bhoy. The cast of Bhoy has not been finalised yet.

Uncanny Episodes will be produced by London-based production company Cup of Tea Studio. The project also completed a fundraising campaign on JustGiving, a global online social platform for fundraising. It is not an Amazon Prime original, but will be jointly released on Amazon Prime Video, as video on demand, and on YouTube for the Bangladeshi audience. The series will be shot in Bangla with English subtitles. It will be dubbed in English later on, depending on how foreign audiences respond to it.

Nafee hopes that TV channels in Bangladesh show their interest in airing Bhoy, and that fans of Misir Ali enjoy the story.