Film: 'A Bid for Bengal' (70 mins., 2022)
Date: Friday, 23 Sept. 2022
Time of Screening: 5:30 PM
Time of Q&A and Live-streaming: 6:40 PM
Venue: Seminar Hall, Dept. of HSS
Q&A YouTube Live-stream link: https://youtu.be/udx90haYDMI
About the film:
The film examines recent political shifts in Bengal using fresh and archival footage with personal family history. It lays bare historical fault lines and visits the workings of frontal organizations in the networks responsible for these changes while offering a narrative of hope in troubled times. The film has received the Best Indian Documentary/ Shubradeep Chakravorty Memorial Award at the Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2022, the Kumar Talkies Best Editing in Documentary Award at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala 2021 and was the official selection for Closing Film in Crossings: An Online Documentary Film Festival 2022, Göttingen, Germany.
About the directors:
Kasturi Basu is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer and editor based in Kolkata. By training, she is a physicist, an alumnus of Jadavpur University, University of Cambridge, and Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey. Basu is a founder-member of the People’s Film Collective, co-organiser of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival, and co-editor of 'Pratirodher Cinema', a Bengali journal on documentary cinema and counterculture. Basu has co-edited the volume, 'Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India' (2018), published by Three Essays Collective, New Delhi. Her filmography as a director includes feature-length documentaries 'S.D.: Saroj Dutta and His Times' (2018) and 'A Bid for Bengal' (2021). She has served on the selection committees of documentary festivals such as International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, Vibgyor and Kolkata People's Film Festival.
Dwaipayan Banerjee is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer and editor based in Kolkata. An alumnus of Presidency College and Calcutta University, he has formerly been a labour activist and labour history researcher. Banerjee is a founder-member of the People’s Film Collective and People’s Study Circle, co-organiser of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival, and co-editor of ‘Pratirodher Cinema’, a Bengali journal on documentary cinema and counterculture. Banerjee has co-edited the volume, 'Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India' (2018), published by Three Essays Collective, New Delhi. Banerjee researched and wrote the feature-length documentary ‘S.D.: Saroj Dutta and His Times’ (2018). 'A Bid for Bengal' (2021) is his debut feature-length documentary as a director.
‘S.D. : Saroj Dutta and His Times’ won the 12th John Abraham National Award for the Best Documentary at the SiGNS Film Festival, Kerala (2018). ‘A Bid for Bengal’ won the Best Documentary award at the Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival (CIDSFF 2022) and the Kumar Talkies award for Best Editing at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK 2021). Basu and Banerjee’s work has been screened widely in community spaces across India apart from being screened at several prestigious documentary festivals including Film Southasia (Kathmandu), IDSFFK (Kerala), Crossings (Goettingen), the Kolkata People's Film Festival (KPFF), SiGNS (Kerala) and CIDSFF (Chennai).