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I've never heard of this Indian director, who was apparently a contemporary of sorts with Satiyajit Ray. Has anyone on these boards ever had the opportunit to see some of his work and perhaps comment? I'm intrigued...

Do a search - there is a bit around

The BFI have released very nice R0 NTSC discs of The Cloud Capped Star and A River Called Titas, as well as Anup Singh's biographical documentary The Name of a River.

I've been meaning to see The Cloud Capped Star for sometime now.

I just saw it:

What a discovery this was! A young, overly idealistic Indian woman is thrust into the position of sole breadwinner of the family after her father is crippled and sadly, suffers. Beautifully filmed, superbly acted. It's an enthralling piece of cinema that I could compare to Bicycle Thieves. I haven't seen that many Indian films but this one is without a doubt, my favorite so far.

Cloud-Capped Star has quite a long in common with Mizoguchi, certainly in its plot concerning female self-sacrifice. Ghatak is a master of spatial composition- see also the superb Subarnarekha-, interested in experimentation and sound effects, also in natural beauty and rivers (inevitably i suppose in Bengal), covers a range of styles from hysterical expressionism to gentle lyricism, occasionally awkward but engaging and apparently with lots of literary and cultural references that passed me by. And his left wing tendencies are ok with me. Bengal has produced some of India's great cultural figures- Nobel winning writer Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, novelist Amitabh Ghosh...

One fault that irritates me with his films is the tendency to exaggerated acting traits, eg the irritating Bijon Bhattacharya (the ageing father in Cloud-Capped Star, paternal friend in Subarnarekha), his Marxist playwright buddy from his time with the theatre. But this is a minor irritant compared with the overall richness of his films