It is half a century since you made your debut on the Hindi film screen with Shyam Benegal’s Nishant. And 39 years since you are gone. Was it only 11 years that you worked in film? Why does it feel like you have been here with us ever since? That you see us, and show us what we are and…
Author: sohinichattopadhyay
Ritwik Ghatak at 100: The Many Re-incarnations of Ritwik in Bollywood
From Subhash Ghai to “Bidhu” Vinod Chopra to Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the unlikely ‘filmi’ students of the Film and Television Institute of India where Ghatak taught for all of two years, keep his legacy alive in unmissable ways. There is also Payal Kapadia, as non-Bollywood as it can get, who mentions his influence on her work The film lovers’ conventional…
50 years and counting: The magnificent reign of Naseeruddin Shah
It is half a century since Shyam Benegal’s Nishant in 1975 where Shah made his debut proper. (He had a walk-on part in the 1967 film Aman, that featured philosopher Bertrand Russell in a cameo.) In the years since, Shah has acted in an astounding 274 films listed on IMDb, with at least one film releasing every calendar year across this half century. A fan’s list of her favourite Naseer films using Bharata’s rasa theory
The Grandson Who Made Me Fall in Love with Ila Mitra
Now that you are up there, Riten, tell your thakma how much you admired her Dear Riten, I first met Ila Mitra through you in March 2021, deep in the global panic of Covid19, although she was already gone 19 years then. I had glimpsed her in disparate blogs and some newspaper articles in Bengali online but she was the…
The Seedling That Birthed a Tree of New Storytelling
50 years of Ankur. 50 years of Shyam Benegal, the anchor of the New Wave movement in Hindi cinema In that last light of day before it is all gone and the crickets have begun calling, a man hurries through paddy fields swollen with the rain that has fallen all day to a hovel that stands across his sturdy home,…
Of our 33 crore gods, only the goddess Shakti can be called a true sports hero
In our two epics, Ram, Lakshman, Arjun are star warriors, but battles are not won on their skill alone. Divine intervention and deception are needed. The story of Durga’s 10-day marathon battle that cemented her place among the top of the gods underlines her strength, willpower and stamina—all the things that count in sport The story about physical exercise that…
The Stories Before Imane Khelif
The Long and Troubling History of Sex Testing in Sport, a Practice Reserved Exclusively for Female Competitors Competitive sport has a long and unsettling history of forcing women athletes to prove their womanhood. Compulsory sex testing was introduced at the 1966 European Athletics Championships in Budapest, which required women to walk in the nude before a group of gynaecologists. One…
Maagh: A companion piece to Haider that does even better
Aamir Bashir’s film treads the same contours–half widows, disappeared people, unmarked graves, the melting sanity of the people. But more quietly, more forcefully led by a magnificent Zoya Hussain, and a stunningly detailed and beautiful background score
Palan: A filmic tribute to Mrinal Sen gets everything wrong
National Award-winning filmmaker Kaushik Ganguly’s Palan is a sequel to Mrinal Sen’s Kharij, the story of a Bhadralok couple whose apathy is responsible for the death of a “servant” boy. The film won the jury prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Aside from plain silliness, Palan is bloated with misdirected sympathy for the Bhadralok Palan is billed as a sequel…
100 Years of Mrinal Sen
From using real footage to voice-overs by Amitabh Bachchan, the legendary middle name in the Ray-Sen-Ghatak trinity set many trends