India’s National Film Development Corporation – National Film Archive of India has completed 4K restorations of the entire feature filmography of auteur Ritwik Ghatak and will present them at a month-long retrospective at BFI Southbank in London running through June, marking the centenary of the director’s birth.
The season, titled “Revolutionary Cinema: The Passion of Ritwik Ghatak,” is curated by filmmaker and academic Sanghita Sen.
Born in 1925, Ghatak is regarded alongside Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen as one of the central figures of Bengali parallel cinema. His work, much of it shaped by the trauma of Partition and the Bengal famine, remained largely outside mainstream distribution during his lifetime but has since attracted sustained international critical attention.
The restorations were carried out under the National Film Heritage Mission, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s archival initiative, drawing on original film elements held by the NFDC-NFAI and the West Bengal State Film Archive. Color grading was supervised by Indian National Film Award-winning cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay.
The program covers the full breadth of Ghatak’s output. The eight restored features include his Partition Trilogy – “Meghe Dhaka Tara,” “Komal Gandhar,” and “Subarnarekha” – alongside “Nagarik,” “Ajantrik,” “Bari Thekey Paliye,” “Titas Ekti Nadir Naam,” and “Jukti Takko Aar Gappo,” of which only five were released in India before his death in 1976. The season also takes in three unfinished films, 13 fiction and documentary shorts, and works Ghatak scripted or appeared in as an actor, among them “The Traveller,” “The Diamond Butterfly,” and “The Uprooted.” A work-in-progress documentary about the director, “Ghatak Was Here,” directed by Sen, is also included.
