204B Block B, Lake Town, Kolkata: My Tête-à-Tête with Shanu Lahiri’s Creative Spirit
By Srilagna Majumdar While I’m aware that many people have penned down their emotions regarding the address mentioned in this piece’s title, I still want to do it again, one more time, in my own way, because the aforementioned address never seems to lose its charm. In 2021, just about 21 years old, I was […]
Of Modernity, Civilization, and Identity: Satyajit Ray’s Agantuk
By Anuska Guin Agantuk (The Stranger) is Satyajit Ray’s last film, released in 1991. The year 1991 is significant because it marks the beginning of liberalization reforms in India. The opening up of the Indian economy led to the rise of a ‘new middle class’ in India, as argued by Leela Fernandes. As the film […]
Baksa Badal: Satyajit Ray the Scriptwriter of a Delightful Bangla Rom-Com
By Suchetona Pal For a few years now, I have nurtured a habit of returning to the literary texts from which many of my favourite films have been adapted. Reading such a text invariably leads to attempts at mapping it to the film’s independent interpretation of it. I remember being fascinated when I first watched […]
Preserving Butterflies
Remembering P.K. Nair, the Legendary Film Archivist
Kabhi Door Kabhi Paas: Mrinal Sen’s Short Films
On following Mrinal Sen’s filmography, one notices a change around the 80s. From sharp socio-political commentaries to self-introspection, there is a gradual shift from looking outward to looking inward. With his earlier films, he earns for himself the title of being a ‘political filmmaker’, while his later films situate themselves within the spaces of the […]
On ‘Shauq’ and Songs that Undo Us
By Anandi Mishra (Cover image: Dust storms in Delhi, Raghu Rai, circa 1986) Ki aankhon mein teriRaat ki nadiYeh baazi toh haari haiSau feesadi Lately, all of us mortal beings (at least the Hindi film buffs) have succumbed to the cascading waves of melancholia that Amit Trivedi’s latest, and so far his best, Hindi music […]
The Mad Heart’s Parable
Reading Agha Shahid Ali’s ‘The Country Without a Post Office’
My Moonwashed Horizons: Moheen and I
Guest Author: Debmalya Bandyopadhyay The first month of college was lonely. Fresh out of school, I was suddenly in a place filled with strangers and had no one to really talk to. As I tried to leave my shell to make friends, I somehow got invited to ‘Music and Lyrics,’ a collaborative event by the […]
Burning Chest and Stormy Eyes: Alienation on Arrival in Gaman
By Sumit Ray One of the most soul-stirring songs to come out of Indian cinema is from a relatively under-regarded film called Gaman (1978, Dir: Muzaffar Ali). In the film, Farooq Sheikh’s character is an urban migrant who has moved to the city of Bombay (as it was called back then) to find work after […]
Ankahi: A Sonorous Proclamation of Wordless Love
By Rohit Saha Though short films, through their apparent structural constraints, appear to be a tricky territory to navigate, filmmakers have time and again found it a very liberating format to tell stories about love. As Tagore said about story stories, ‘Sesh hoyeo hoilo na sesh’ (it ends, but doesn’t seem to have ended), scriptwriters […]
