Stories rooted in personal history often feel more intimate. For filmmaker Soumik Sen, creating the Bengali series, Jazz City, began with family memories of migration, passed down by his mother about her parents’ journey to India.

“My grandparents left almost everything when they came to Kolkata. This is not a unique story. There are so many people who migrated during the Partition, 1947-48. There is one particular scene where a child is picking up empty bullet cartridges after his entire family has been massacred; [it was] something that a musician on the show told me,” recalls Sen.