My Kolkata City

What is common among Monalisa Dasgupta, Sangeeta Datta, Shila Datta, Uri Chakraborty and Sharmila Maiti? These gutsy young women reflect the minority presence at the 16th Kolkata Film Festival (KFF) this year.

Other than international greats like Liv Ullman and Marta Metzaros, these are the only Indian women whose films have been chosen for screening under different sections of the festival.This hardly skims the surface of women filmmakers in the country and compares very poorly indeed with the quantitative inputs over previous years. Let us take a closer look.

Urmi Chakraborty, who made news with her National Award-winning feature film Hemanter Pakhi (2002) switched over to documentaries after this film.Her documentary Infiltrators (1999) also, bagged a National Award.

Trials of Sri Aurobindo is a 23-minute documentary that scans the great spiritual leader’s ideology, spiritual concepts and philosophy as one way of enlightening and informing the present generation and reminding them about values that are in a state of sad decay among today’s youth and national leaders.

Matangini Hazra is a short fiction film produced by Films Division and directed by veteran documentary maker Sheela Datta. It is named after one of the most memorable freedom fighters in Bengal who, in her ripe age, fell to bullets shot at her by the British police as she led a procession to claim Tamluk Thana in Bengal’s Medinipur district on September 29, 1942.

Noted television and theatre actress Chhanda Chatterjee has played the title role with support from Bibek Adhikari as Ajoy Mukherjee who later became the CM of West Bengal and was Matangini’s political guru.

Sadhan Pramanik, a local headmaster of Tamluk, has played an important role. Datta, who hasscripted the film, said she did her research at the local public library at Tamluk that has a massive collection of books, documents and newspaper clippings of the freedom fight in and around the area.

“Matangini was also called Gandhi Buri (The Old Gandian) because of her dedication to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology of non-violence,” informed Datta. Datta is all praise for the cooperation she got from the local people and from a few living compatriots of Matangini

Beyond Borders, directed by Sharmila Maiti, is a docu-fiction inspired by the Partition of India. Ghatak’s films explored the condition of the refugees who were forced to migrate into the Eastern state of West Bengal.

The three noted actresses who played the mother, daughter and sister in Ghatak’s Meghe DhakaTara come together in front of the camera in an informal ambience and through their memories of their work in the film, also trace their personal experiences of the Partition.

The second part is fictional. It draws parallels with Meghe Dhaka Tara with a contemporary, urban and modern Kolkata. It is about Nita whose situation is no different from Nita from Ghatak’s film. The over-generous outsourced material notwithstanding, Beyond Partition would have come across as a reasonably good film.

NRI Monalisa Dasgupta‘s Lost Mother is a 85-minute long docu-fiction about the director’s journeying into India to find her own feet and also to create a bridge between her growing son and herself by making a film on a rural-based NGO for women. She fictionalises her personal story for the film calling herself Mithu while she documents the work of the NGO which is factual.

However, her film is very self-indulgent as she does not articulate the voices of the women and the girls the NGO works to help them gain self-sufficiency by keeping their answers off the sound-track of the film. Technically, it is a well-made film but suffers from the usual melodrama with the protagonist’s meeting with her former lover who is a wandering singer.

Sangeeta Datta’s full-length feature film Life Goes On is the most lavishly mounted and commercially viable film among all the five films of Indian women directors. The story is about an upper-class Bengali family settled in London for 40 years. It consists of Sanjoy Banerjee, a doctor, his wife Manju and their three daughters.

The film opens with the sudden death of the mother and the rest of the film shows how the family copes with this loss. The film has mind-blowing music by the director’s son Shoumik and two Tagore songs translated into Hindi by Javed Akhtar. The film has already been premiered at the UK as part of a retrospective of films starring Sharmila Tagore who plays Manju in the film opposite Girish Karnad who portrays her arrogant husband.

Questions that arise here are – why so few women when women are venturing into film-making every other day by droves in our country, in every section – feature, documentary, docu-fiction, the works? Are they wanting in marketing and promotion? Do exhibitors, distributors and festival organizers shy away from women directors? These are questions that need to be introspected upon. Think about them, do.

Original Source: CT