Director: Gautam Ghose; Writer: Partha Banerjee, Samaresh Basu, Goutam Ghose, Partho Mukerjee; Producer: Swapan Sarkar; Cinematographer: Gautam Ghose; Editor: Prasanta Dey; Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Utpal Dutt, Om Puri, Mohan Agashe, Anil Chatterjee, Ruma Guha-Thakurta, Sunil Mukherjee, Kamu Mukherjee
Duration: 02:06:34; Aspect Ratio: 1.375:1; Hue: 9.994; Saturation: 0.093; Lightness: 0.258; Volume: 0.196; Cuts per Minute: 4.693
Summary: One of the former photo-journalist and
documentarist Ghosh’s best-known films, it
features a familiar New Indian Cinema cast:
Shah, Puri and Azmi. A fable of exploitation in
rural Bihar, in which the landlord’s (Dutt) men
wreck a village and kill the benevolent
schoolmaster (Chatterjee) who was its
progressive force. The labourer Naurangia
(Shah) breaks with a tradition of passive
resistance and retaliates by killing the
landlord’s brother. Naurangia and his wife
Rama (Azmi) become fugitives from justice.
After many efforts to find sustenance
elsewhere, the two decide to return home. To
earn the fare, they agree to drive a herd of pigs
through a river, causing the pregnant Rama to
believe she has lost her baby. At the end of the
film Naurangia puts his ear to her belly and
listens to the heartbeats of the unborn child.
The original short story dealt mainly with the
river crossing and the film was criticised for not
adequately integrating this episode with the
others. With this film Ghosh joined the trend of
70s ruralist realism, although the river-crossing
episode achieves a wider metaphoric
resonance.
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