Mrinal Sen @ St Andrews

Join the IGCCC for a workshop dedicated to the memory of the great Indian Bengali director Mrinal Sen, who died on 30 December 2018.

The event will follow our established format of featuring several contributions about the work of the director and its social context, followed by a film screening and a discussion.

The programme includes contributions from: Kunal Sen, son of the director; Nandita Das, actress, Amar Bhuvan (2002); Ranjan Palit, cameraman (tbc).

There will be presentations from: Sanghita Sen on curating Mrinal Sen's work; Shruti Narayanswami on Neel Akasher Neechey (1958), which tells the story of an immigrant Chinese worker in Calcutta; and Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal on Chalchitra/The Kaleidoscope (1981) and the act of reportage.

We will show Sen's classic Calcutta 71 (1972), a black and white complex masterpiece with a narrative that alternates between stories and different points in time. An angry young man is on trial in 1971, a rainstorm wrecks a slum in 1933, a lower-middle-class family is starving during the 1943 famine, teenagers turn smugglers in 1953, and a middle-class group chatter in a posh hotel in 1971.

Everybody is welcome to this commemoration of Mrinal Sen, whose death “marks the end of Golden Age of Indian cinema's stalwart filmmakers” (Hindustan Times).