Times are hard in the city of Calcutta. Apu’s (Soumitra Chatterjee) college funds have run dry, and he is forced to suspend his university education. After receiving a letter of introduction from a supportive professor, Apu exits the faculty office only to walk into the chaos of a student protest. It is a harbinger of […]
Jalsaghar opens to the shot of a large, ornate, candlelit chandelier, precariously swaying from the momentum of its cumbersome weight. It is a vestige of the fading grandeur of Huzur Biswambhar Roy’s (Chhabi Biswas) cherished jalsaghar – the elegant entertainment room where guests listen to the performance of traditional musicians amid eroded columns and peeling […]
The people make their daily pilgrimage to the Ganges River: bathing in its holy waters, filling their ceremonial vessels, attending a reading of the scriptures by the entrance steps. The Ray family has left their ancestral home (in Pather Panchali) and has settled into a ground floor apartment in the city of Banaras. Hari (Kanu […]
A young girl named Durga (Runki Banerjee) ventures into the neighbor’s orchard that was once owned by her family, and picks some guavas for her great aunt, Indir (Chunibala Devi). The neighbors detect the incident, and complain loudly of Durga’s undisciplined behavior for her mother, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) to overhear. Sarbajaya, in turn, scolds Indir […]
Marc Recha channels the spirit of Lisandro Alonso’s primitivistic, metaphoric journey of interiority in Los Muertos (a derivation made all the more transparent by an extended river exploration sequence) to a visually sublime, but soporific and tediously unoriginal effect in Days of August. Ostensibly a personal chronicle of a writer, Marc (Marc Recha) who embarks […]
During the Q&A for the film, filmmaker David Redmon explained that the initial concept for Mardi Gras: Made in China revolved around the idea of exploring the interconnection between pop culture, ritual, and globalization. To this end, the idea of tracing the origin of a disposable commodity – Mardi Gras beads – seemed ideally suited […]