Director: Ajay Bannerjee; Writer: Samiran Datta; Cinematographer: Soumendu Roy; Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Mamata Shankar, Dipankar Dey, Ajoy Bannerjee, Moon Moon Sen, Sanghamitra Sarkar
Summary: The radical filmmaker Niranjan Chakraborty
(Chatterjee) witnesses his friend, police officer
Ratanlal, commit a murder. The assassinated
man is a noted intellectual and Niranjan’s
erstwhile Communist mentor. In a drunken
moment Niranjan discloses what he saw to a
young journalist, causing a major political
scandal. In the end, he denies having seen
anything incriminating and rescues the corrupt
officer from a prison sentence. The plot is
padded by the journalist turning out to be the
filmmaker’s illegitimate daughter by an earlier
wife (Shankar) who rejected him because of his
unprincipled opportunism. The epilogue has
the filmmaker win awards, his radical
reputation intact. Much of the film depends on
local references to actual people and events,
e.g. the murder in the film evokes the
assassination, during Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s
ministry, of noted Naxalite poet and intellectual
Saroj Dutta by the police which it is commonly
believed was actually witnessed by the star
Uttam Kumar. The radical filmmaker
character is seen as a caricature of Mrinal Sen
and Utpal Dutt.
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