It was that time of the year: my annual sojourn to Kolkata for their 23rd international film festival. I was part of a British Council delegation celebrating the ongoing UK-India Year of Culture events. The country in focus at the festival was the UK and film-goers were treated to a showcase of classic and contemporary British films, including The Lady Vanishes , The English Patient , Lawrence of Arabia, in its full 228 minute glory, Adult Life Skills and Lady Macbeth . There was also a retrospective of eminent filmmaker Michael Winterbottom and titles featured included Trishna , The Claim and The Road to Guantanamo , amongst others.
Much to the delight of Kolkatans, Winterbottom was also part of the British Council delegation. I was on a panel with him where we discussed the future of cinema, as one does on these occasions. He revealed to me that his next film, The Wedding Guest , is set in India and will star Dev Patel. Also present in the city as part of the delegation was eminent British academic Rachel Dwyer, who delivered the annual Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture.
The best part of any festival is the networking and I made the acquaintance of several distinguished international filmmakers, including Italo Spinelli ( Gangor ) from Italy, Iranian production and costume designer Malek Khazai ( The Flowers of Kirkuk ), and Filipina actress Angeli Bayani ( Ilo Ilo ), and renewed my acquaintance with Turkish filmmaker Yesim Ustaoglu ( Clair Obscur ), who I had first met at the Kerala festival last year.
Marcela Said’s Los Perros (Chile/France) deservedly won the international competition and Ása Helga Hjörleifsdótirr won best director for The Swan (Iceland), with special mentions for Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze for Birds are Singing in Kigali (Poland) and Kazem Mollaie’s Kupal (Iran).
Apart from all the excellent films from India and elsewhere on display at the festival, there was a real surprise at the end. I was invited to an exclusive private screening of an early cut of Song of Dusk , a documentary about the late Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh who was tragically taken from us a few months away from his 50th birthday in 2013. It is directed by British filmmaker Sangeeta Datta and produced by the UK’s Stormglass Productions. Datta was an associate director on several Ghosh films, including Chokher Bali and The Last Lear . She was also an associate director on Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane and herself made her feature directorial debut with Life Goes On.
In a word, Song of Dusk is exquisite. Rather than use a traditional script or voice over, Datta uses Ghosh’s own words, culled from his columns for the magazine Robbar , read mostly by Soumitra Chatterjee, to tell his own story.
Despite her close association with Ghosh, Datta never strays into hagiography, featuring positives and negatives with equal felicity. In addition to his life and work, Datta also looks at Ghosh’s sexuality, the subject of much media speculation when he was alive. The documentary’s cinematographers also translate Ghosh’s pellucid prose about Kolkata into refined images, thus rendering the city as an important character. By the end of the preview, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. This film is going places.
