Mrinal Sen

Does India have a national cinema? Does it, indeed, require one? Mrinal Sen is not quite sure. Yet, his latest celluloid essay, And the Show Goes On, a British Film Institute-funded tribute to the world’s largest movie industry in cinema’s centenary year, is quite polemically categorical about what India’s filmic output should be.

But can it ever be what it ideally ought to be? Again, Sen, as is his wont, is not forth coming with a clear answer. His prescription, however, is rather unambiguous: cinema should confront social realities, no matter how harsh; it cannot continue being as cavalierly escapist as it is in India and yet expect to be taken seriously on the global stage. As film director and critic Chidananda Dasgupta says on camera: “India lives too much by myth and too little by fact”. That, for Sen, is where the problem begins. And ends. Read More »

Synopsis-
Nothing is common between the two men to ever meet and understand each other; neither the origin of the British administration of imperial time nor the primitive culture of the tribal from the jungle in central India. Nothing is common but the sharing of a common passion: hunting.

To both of them a big game is a game, a prey is a prey; this is probably why Ghinua, the young hunter and a loving husband, reacts like a terrible “hunter” when the usurer-landlord steals his wife. He slays him as the wild pigs have to be slain when they destroy harvest, or a tiger when he lifts a child. An avenged man, he brings his trophy, the head of the most mischievous game in his area, to the only man who will understand him, the English sahib, the other hunter. Read More »

Synopsis:
Ranjit is a young man who has been assured a lucrative job in an Indo-British firm by a family friend. All he has to do is turn up for the interview dressed in a western-style suit. As luck would have it, all city laundries are on strike that morning, and his only suit is dirty. The film is a frantic search for a new suit to be borrowed from any of his friends, to make it in time for the interview. Read More »

Synopsis
A movie about making a movie. A young, idealistic director arrives in a village to make a picture set during the Great Bengal Famine. It’s a film that he hopes will reveal the problems and privations still current in rural India.

Awards:
National Award 1981 – Golden Lotus (Best Film)
Berlin Film Festival 1981 – Silver Bear. Read More »

The time is immediately before World War II. The place a remote village in Bengal. Priyanath, a middle aged man and the last offspring of a once wealthy family, gets married to a lovely teenage girl to please his widowed mother. Overcoming the initial inhibitions, he starts enjoying the happiness of a normal married life. Read More »

Plot synopsis:
The bread-winning daughter in a middle-class family fails to return from work one evening. The night begins with worries at home, followed by midnight searches and finally a deepening crisis arising out of economic and moral constraints prevalent in the society. Yet the film speaks of hope, of strength hidden behind despair. Read More »

Synopsis
A political activist escapes the prison van and is sheltered in a posh apartment owned by a sensitive young woman. Both are rebels: the activist against political treachery and the other on social level. Both are bitter about badly organized state of things. Being in solitary confinement, the fugitive engages himself in self-criticism and, in the process, questions the leadership. Questions are not allowed, obeying that is mandatory. Displeasure leads to bitterness, bitterness to total rift. The struggle has to continue, both for the political activist, now segregated, and the woman in exile. Read More »