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Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen
Photo credit: Sanjeet Chowdhury
In his illustrious career as a feature film-maker, Mrinal Sen also directed four documentaries. According to son Kunal Sen, "In general, my father was very lukewarm about documentaries. He enjoyed making feature films. Anything else was treated as a distraction. The four documentaries he made were when he could not avoid them. Even though he really enjoyed watching documentaries made by other people, and often talked about them, he could rarely sustain his interest in making them. Even when he started with some enthusiasm, it started to fade away halfway through the project, as he got impatient to make his next feature film."Jogging his ...
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Filmography
- Moving Perspectives (1967)
- Tripura Prasanga (1982)
- City Life - Calcutta My Eldorado (1990)
- And the Show Goes On - Indian Chapter (1996)
Did You Know?
The director himself has been a subject of many documentaries. That includes Reinhard Hauff’s Ten Days in Calcutta — A Portrait of Mrinal Sen (1984), Supantho Bhattacharya’s A Man Behind The Curtain (1998), Sanjay Bhattacharya and Rahul Bose’s With Mrinal Sen (1989), Romesh Sharma’s Portrait of a Filmmaker (1999), Chidananda Dasgupta’s Mrinal Sen Revisited (2001), Nripen Gangopadhyay’s Mrinal Sen: Self and Cinema (2013) and RV Ramani’s A Documentary Proposal (2014). Hauff’s documentary was a dialogue between two filmmakers from two different continents but with similar problems and concerns. While shooting for Dasgupta’s documentary, the veteran director had himself differentiated it from the other projects made on him saying: “Dasgupta is a longtime friend, so I was not just a marionette in his hands”.
The 44-minute-long A Documentary Proposal was photographed, edited, directed and produced by Ramani. The genesis of this documentary was interesting. Ramani was in Kolkata in 2013 when a few officials from the Films Division of India under Virender Kundu, had decided to make a documentary on Mrinal Sen. They were visiting his Padmapukur residence to discuss the proposal with him. Ramani, a big fan of Sen, went along with his camera. At the end of the meeting, he realised that he already had a film with him!
A four-episode documentary titled Celebrating Mrinal Sen, primarily based on conversations between the director and renowned film critic and analyst Sameek Bandyopadhyay, was made in 2013. The project was directed by Ananya Banerjee, a senior programme officer of the Doordarshan Directorate in New Delhi. It included excerpts from Sen's films and comments from son Kunal and the likes of Soumitra Chattopadhyay, Madhabi Mukhopadhyay, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Dhritiman Chatterji, Annu Kapoor, Suhasini Mulay, Mithun Chakraborty, Nandita Das, Ranjit Mullick, Mamata Shankar, Aparna Sen, Anjan Dutt, Bibhas Chakraborty, Arun Mukhopadhyay, Pankaj Kapur, MK Raina, Govind Nihalini, Shyam Benegal, Jwahar Sircar and Suman Mukhopadhyay.
Research by: Geety Sahgal
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