TSPDT

Key Production Country: India
Key Genres: Drama, Rural Drama, Romance, Epic, Family Drama, Culture & Society
Key Collaborators: Ramesh Joshi (Editor), Ravi Chatterjee (Production Designer), Bijon Bhattacharya (Leading Actor), Satindra Bhattacharya (Leading Character Actor), Gyanesh Mukherjee (Character Actor), Anil Chatterjee (Leading Character Actor), Gita Dey (Character Actress), Dinen Gupta (Cinematographer), Dilip Ranjan Mukhopadhyay (Cinematographer), Baby Islam (Cinematographer), Supriya Choudhury (Leading Character Actress), Abinash Bannerjee (Leading Character Actor)

"Ghatak was born in Dacca in Eastern Bengal, and the forced partition of his country that made him for many years an exile from his home caused a psychological wound that never healed. This trauma echoes through several of his films, notably Subarnarekha (1962, released 1965) (The Golden Thread) and his finest and richest work, Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) (The Cloud-Capped Star)." - Philip Kemp (501 Movie Directors, 2007)

"Bengali-born director, poet, and actor Ritwik Ghatak’s career was one of constant struggle—against a public that, per his contemporary Satyajit Ray, “largely ignored” his films; against a society that had lost its way amid rampant modernization; and against a national cinema whose conventions he broke time and again. He only completed eight fiction feature films during his lifetime, but each represents a landmark achievement in the history of Indian cinema, movingly reflecting the social realities of a nation trying to revise its identity in the aftermath of British colonial rule and the partition of India and Pakistan, and representing the melodrama of everyday life under the country’s newly modernized economy." - Film at Lincoln Center, 2019

"Since his death at age fifty in 1976, Ritwik Ghatak has come to be regarded as one of the greatest figures in postwar Indian cinema for his brilliant and abrasive films, which certainly rank among the most revolutionary achievements in contemporary Indian art. Involved from an early age in politics and in theater, Ghatak was a member of the Indian Communist Party and regarded Brecht and Eisenstein as his artistic heroes. Consequently, Ghatak's films wed his activism with rich cultural content, fashioning popular forms – melodrama, songs, dances – into appropriate vehicles for radical political expression. His films are almost all veiled autobiography." - Harvard Film Archive, 2008

"Ritwik Ghatak was perhaps not always as consistent in the totality of his films as Ray, but his cinematic frames just took your breath away. His choice of locations and lenses were mesmerising. He also created some beautiful emotional moments in his films." - Aparna Sen

"Emotionally intense experience that Ghatak’s films are they are also a reflection on consciousness, nature, and human destiny. They invite us to make connections with cultural pasts and political landscapes, and open up a space for thinking the history of the present. Cinema rarely affords us this adventure of ideation. The modernism that his work embraced did not depend on a tradition-modernity divide, but had an intuitive understanding of the internally heterogeneous modernity that seems to be the reality of most of the world." - Moinak Biswas (Take on Art)

"Filmmaking is not an esoteric thing to me. I consider filmmaking to start with a personal thing. If a person does not have a vision of his own, he cannot create." - Ritwik Ghatak