Movies: Mrinal Sen

Reel 12 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series....

Indian documentary about Indian film history and P. K. Nair, the founder of the National Film Archive of India and guardian of Indian cinema. He built the archive can by can in a country where the archiving of cinema was considered unimportant....

A kaleidoscopic panorama of the world. A visual anthology of twelve short stories by twelve innovative directors from all over the world....

The film unfolds the history of India since the beginning of time to present day through the help of sculptures, paintings, photographs and live action shots. It highlights the Indian Independence Movement starting with the revolution in 1857, culmin...

This is a simple, straightforward tale about the rise and fall of human civilization that focuses solely on four characters: a farmer (Naseeruddin Shah), a weaver (Om Puri), a trader (M.K. Raina), and a woman (Shabana Azmi). At the beginning of the s...

This biographical film is a tribute to a pioneering actress Smita Patil through her works a tribute to the parallel cinema. Her realistic dignified portrayals of the emerging women's movement in India creating a space for women on screen and role mod...

The spirit of a condemned 20-year-old student wanders through time, linking together four stories of people struggling for survival in this gritty meditation on poverty, natural disaster and political strife in India. A middle-class family's home is ...

While Northern India’s 100-year-old film industry is best known for flamboyant dance sequences and romantic plot lines, its directors have begun to step outside established formulas and explore grittier subject matter. This program surveys the world ...

A small company advertises for 100 vacancies and 30,000 apply. The applicants are all from the ranks of the poor and there is a virtual riot. Everyone around is seeking for opportunities. Among them are the applicants who desperately need the job, th...

‘Joradighir Choudhury Paribar’ is the story of landlords, their ego, love and revenge. Despite ancestral differences, the Choudhury family’s landlord and Indrani, the landlady of Raktadaha decide to get married. But circumstances for him to marry Ban...

A British administrator with a flair for game hunting develops a friendship with a commoner who is an expert archer in an Indian village. The movie portrays the relationship between the British colonialists, and native villagers who were exploited b...

​A pre-teenager servant boy dies of carbon monoxide poisoning on a cold winter night in the kitchen. The happy household is suddenly thrown into a psychological trauma. Torn between a sense of guilt and fear of a police case and consequently scandal,...

Burning with a desire to be a journalist, a young man gets his chance when a publisher -- the father of a friend -- suggests that he write a story on the daily life of the people in his house (several families worth of people). The material turns out...

Bhuvan Shome is a lonely widower, a proud old man and a strict disciplinarian. Looking back on the trodden path, strewn with staunch determination and drab attitudes, Bhuvan Shome, a thoroughly unenchanted man, seeks escape in a holiday....

The bread-winning daughter in a middle-class family fails to return from work one evening. The saga begins with worries at home, followed by midnight searches and finally a deepening crisis arising out of economic and moral constraints prevalent in t...

After being accused wrongly of theft, a slightly addled servant runs away to the city, carrying as his only real possession an axe, which he claims to have killed a tiger with. He takes up life among India's throngs of city-dwelling homeless, and for...

After Shokhina's marriage to Noor ends, she remarries Meher but faces many complications in her married life. Things get worse when Noor returns to India as a married rich man....

A young, idealistic director arrives in a village to make a picture set during the Great Bengal Famine. It’s a film that he hopes will reveal the problems and privations still current in rural India....

A film by Mrinal Sen....

Shasanka is a retired teacher who lives with his wife and two daughters. The family is thrown into an uproar after he goes out for a walk and disappears from their lives. Each member of the family reviews her final hours and days with him to try and ...