‘At KIFF, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and I will talk about Ghatak's transformational impact and influence on us’
Times of India | 3 November 2025
KOLKATA: The 31st Kolkata International Film Festival kicks off two days after Ritwik Ghatak turns 100. The festival is going to celebrate Ghatak’s centenary with the screening of his “Ajantrik”, “Bari Theke Paliye”, “Meghe Dhaka Tara”, “Komal Gandhar”, “Titas Ekti Nodir Naam”, and “Subarnarekha”.
A special screening of Geneva-based Anup Singh’s “Ekti Nadir Naam” (ENN) – a love story between a man and a woman crossing landscapes reminiscent of Ghatak’s cinema and playing characters from the icon’s films but in new circumstances – has also been organized on Nov 8.
On Nov 12, KIFF has organized the Ritwik Ghatak Memorial Conversation featuring director
with Singh. Ghatak had joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) as the vice principal and professor of film direction when Gopalakrishnan was a second year student there in 1963.
Singh, who was not a direct student of Ghatak at FTII, considers the icon as his teacher of cinema nevertheless. He first met Gopalakrishnan as a student at the Pune film school and the relationship over cinema has continued for 40 years.
Many who will attend this session are waiting for Gopalakrishnan to reminisce about Ghatak’s cinematic discourses at FTII and share how the ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ director had screened Satyajit Ray’s ‘Aparajito’ at their FTII class.
“I presume we’ll talk about this inspirational teacher’s transformational impact and influence on us. How we each see the power and resplendence of the epic form in his films, the musical elaborations and evocations that shatter any constraining sense of identity and return us to the plurality we all are,” Singh told TOI from Geneva.
Singh, who is also a jury member of the KIFF competition of Indian language films, is waiting to revisit on the big screen “the grand landscapes, music and the luminous, agonizing performances of the extraordinary Madhabi Mukherjee in ‘Subarnarekha’, and Supriya Chowdhury and the vivid Anil Chatterjee in ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ and ‘Komal Gandhar’”.
Fresh out of FTII, Singh had directed ENN starring Shiboprosad Mukhopadhyay, Shomi Kaiser and Supriya Devi to pay a homage to Ghatak and do “what his work asked of everything, everyone, again and again - to fight the easy affirmation of all founding truth, and, yet, offer shelter to all arguments”.
As a young filmmaker, Singh had felt the need to “reimagine” his relation with cinema and the world. ‘ENN’ begins with a love story – just like many of Ghatak’s films - between a man and a woman crossing the river between Bangladesh and India.
“As they cross various landscapes familiar from the films of Ritwikda - for example the abandoned airfield in ‘Subarnarekha’ or Kurseong as seen in ‘Komal Gandhar’ - they play some of the characters in Ritwikda’s films, but in new circumstances.
They play the roles of refugees, divine beings and other literary characters. This journey through Ritwikda’s cinema allowed me to look at every element, be it plot, the wide-angle lens, colour, and how it could free itself from defining people, communities, the earth.
Every element had to expand on its entrenched limits and to cross borders into other ways of thinking and seeing,” Singh described.
Singh believes that the significance of its screening at KIFF on Ghatak’s centenary year is a “celebration of a certain tradition”. “The tradition, which, since the questions of Naciketa, seeks resolutely to invigorate and embolden the human aspiration to go to the very end of the potentialities of our being on this earth.
But, like the Buddha, it also teaches us to hold out against the temptations of personal freedom or moksa.
The attempt is to create a world together where we all have the choice about our life’s path. I believe that’s what we are really celebrating as we celebrate the centenary year of Ritwik Ghatak,” Singh said.
Ghatak’s films, Singh explained, “grow out of a movement from a stifled order of existence to affirm our quest for vital reconciliation with our universe”.
“His cinema is a gift, living with us from moment to moment of our day as a song, a sparkling light, a call, a nourishing river, exhorting us to nuance with compassion every choice we make in the labyrinth of our conscience as we live our day. And this year, as we celebrate his centenary, perhaps we celebrate ourselves too, because we continue to learn from his cinema to resist all that would make our breath less, we continue to let his cinema keep ablaze our rage to not only survive, but to live with exaltation the life and universe we have been gifted.
There is no other cinema that holds a greater solicitude for us on this earth,” Singh described.
Singh firmly believes that Ghatak’s cinema blazes with “what is rarely seen in the history of Indian cinema”. “It is the defining principle of not only filmmaking, but all the arts: the choice and the making of every element in a work is a re-imagining of the relation with the self, the other, the earth and the universe. If not, then the work is duplicitous.
Much of cinema, sadly, is an instrumentalizing of every element in the service of a predetermining narrative or some doctrinal beliefs.
Against such an approach, music or the face in Ritwikda’s films, for example, at many points break away from dramatic, psychological expression and, instead, suddenly, come aglow as figures in residence within cultural memory. These transformative moments demand that we see, listen, think and reflect again on the systems we have built to shape our idea of the self, community and nation,” Singh said.
On being asked about his observation about contemporary Indian cinema, Singh said, “There are some astounding films being made by young filmmakers in India and, every year, the new works expand my understanding of our people, our country and of cinema. These films fill me with pride. Generally, though, we live in a time when only what we can see is endorsed. I am hoping, perhaps, once again, we can start celebrating what we don’t see, that which is uncharted, the indeterminable, the unknown.