Movies: Mrinal Sen

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 ...

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....

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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....

Ranjit is a young man who has been assured a lucrative job. All he has to do is turn up for the interview dressed in a western style suit, but all the city laundries are on strike that morning, and his only suit is dirty....

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...

Subhash is a photographer from the city, who has come to take pictures of some old temples and ruins in a village. Ruins fascinate him. While in the village, he gets acquainted with a young woman, Jamini, who has had her heart broken in the past, by ...

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...

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...

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...

The 'Century of Cinema' is an 18-part series produced by the British Film Institute to celebrate 100 years of cinema. The series includes films directed by Scorsese, Oshima, Godard, among others. Mrinal Sen directed the Indian chapter of the series....

​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,...

The mistress of a wealthy man, alone in her huge apartment and terribly lonely, phones strangers in the middle of the night. One night she phones a young writer, and as the days pass and the conversations continue a relationship forms between two peo...

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....

When the elderly mother of a Kolkata middle-class family commits suicide, no one has the courage to read the old woman's diary. When the eldest son returns from Germany, his anxious questioning brings to light the disorientation experienced by the fa...

A political activist escapes the prison van and is sheltered in a posh apartment owned by a sensitive young woman. Both are rebels: the activist against political treachery and the other on social level. Both are bitter about badly organized state of...

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...

‘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...